Google senior scientist Jeff Dean is leaving the company, and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, is stepping down as CEO to become Alphabet’s chief scientist and transition to chairman of Google DeepMind. Alphabet announced the change on August 5 (local time). In a memo, Hassabis said, “Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is approaching,” and he plans to dedicate more time to AGI research, long-term strategy, and Isomorphic Labs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), will oversee DeepMind’s day-to-day operations while continuing as Alphabet’s chief AI architect. Key AI talent departures include Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, who left to found Discovery Loop, a startup focused on machine learning and scientific research. Dean co-founded Google Brain in 2011 and led Gemini development. In June, Noam Shazeer moved to OpenAI, and Nobel laureate John Jumper announced joining Anthropic. Reuters reported that Google’s talent exodus could hinder its ability to recover AI innovation and product execution. The release of Google’s flagship AI model, Gemini 3 Pro, has been delayed, raising concerns about falling behind competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as affordable Chinese open-source models. On the news, Alphabet’s stock fell over 4% in U.S. trading.