Alphabet announced a leadership overhaul of its AI division on Wednesday, with AI chief Demis Hassabis leaving his main managerial role. Hassabis, a Nobel Prize recipient, will take the newly created title of Alphabet's chief scientist and transition from Google DeepMind CEO to chairman, citing the closeness of artificial general intelligence (AGI) as the impetus. Koray Kavukcuoglu, the unit's chief technology officer, will assume day-to-day responsibilities as senior vice president. Several leaders of its Gemini model, including Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, departed to launch a startup called Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation. The shakeup comes as the flagship version of its latest Gemini model remains unreleased despite a planned June launch, sparking concerns that Google is falling behind rivals Anthropic and OpenAI. Hassabis will explore research and strategy related to societal impacts of AGI and will spend more time with Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company for which he is founder and CEO. He touted "great progress" on Google's AI models including an unreleased upgrade called Gemini 4.