Demis Hassabis has reportedly considered leaving Google DeepMind alongside departing Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, but Google persuaded him to stay due to concerns over a sharp plunge in its stock price, according to the organization Pathfounders. Hassabis has stepped down as CEO of DeepMind to serve as Chairman of DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, Google's parent company. Pathfounders claims Hassabis was "eventually persuaded to take the chairman position, allowing the institution to maintain a smooth transition for a period of time, so that he can formally leave the company decently at a later stage," suggesting his retention may be temporary. The report follows internal shifts at Google DeepMind, including Koray Kavukcuoglu, who took over daily operations from Hassabis, moving from London to California, with core work like Gemini model development, product iteration, and post-training increasingly centered around the US headquarters. Additionally, last month, Google DeepMind disbanded the originally independent AlphaFold team, reassigning most AlphaFold paper authors to projects covering Gemini, code generation, genomics, enzyme design, nuclear fusion, and other fields, while some moved to Isomorphic Labs led by Hassabis. Google DeepMind explained its scientific strategy has shifted from solving specific scientific problems one by one to leveraging general models like Gemini to accelerate scientific discovery.