Alphabet announced on Wednesday that Demis Hassabis, Google's head of AI, will step down from his current role to become Alphabet's chief scientist and chair of DeepMind, a change he said will allow him to focus on "long-term strategy" and accelerating scientific breakthroughs, including work at Isomorphic Labs, an AI-powered drug discovery lab spun out from DeepMind in 2021. Hassabis won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2024. As part of the reshuffling, DeepMind's chief technology officer and chief AI architect Koray Kavukcuoglu will become the division's senior vice president and oversee operations including development of Google's flagship frontier models and products known as Gemini. Longtime Google engineer Jeff Dean is also leaving the company after nearly three decades to "try something new," according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010, and four years later, Google bought the research lab for $650 million. His co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, is currently the chief of Microsoft's AI segment. Google is competing with other major AI developers including Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, as well as DeepSeek and Moonshot in China. Hassabis wrote that he has been working towards AGI his whole life and feels it is "close at hand," prompting his decision to hand over day-to-day operational responsibilities. Observers have been waiting for Google to announce a more powerful version of its AI