Alphabet’s Google is losing prominent artificial intelligence veterans in a major overhaul, casting doubt over leadership in a critical growth area as competition intensifies. Alphabet shares fell as much as 5.5 per cent on the news. Jeff Dean, a longtime Google employee central to the company’s AI strategy, is departing to launch a startup, taking several high-profile colleagues with him. Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind, is moving into a chairman role, assuming the dual titles of chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. He is handing operational control to Koray Kavukcuoglu, promoted to senior vice-president of Google DeepMind, reporting to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, announced Wednesday (Aug 5) in a blog post. Dean is bringing at least three other prominent DeepMind employees – Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals – to his new venture, called Discovery Loop, a startup that will automate machine learning research. Google faces intensifying pressure from rivals including Anthropic and OpenAI. Despite pouring tens of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure and talent, the company has faced criticism that it has been too slow to turn research into commercial progress, like AI coding. The personnel changes represent the biggest reorganisation of Google’s AI efforts since the company combined its research teams under DeepMind in 2023. Hassabis co-founded DeepMind, sold to Google in 2014.