Alphabet shares fell 4.1% after the British Nobel winner handed over control
Sir Demis Hassabis has stepped down as chief executive of Google DeepMind, the British AI lab he founded and sold to Google. Alphabet shares fell 4.1% after the announcement on 5 August.
Hassabis becomes chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, Reuters reported. Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously the lab’s chief technology officer, takes over daily operations as a senior vice president reporting to Alphabet boss Sundar Pichai. He does not take the standalone chief executive title.
Hassabis will stay in the UK and remains chief executive of Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet-backed drug discovery company he also founded.
‘I’ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at Google DeepMind, so I have the time and space to focus on the big picture’, Hassabis told staff.
Shares drop as investors weigh the exits
Alphabet’s Class C shares closed at $360.13 in New York on Wednesday, down $15.22, or roughly 4.1%. Some reports put the intraday fall at as much as 6% before the shares recovered ground.
The market reaction reflects a talent problem that goes well beyond one man. On the same day, longtime Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, who joined the company in 1999, announced he is leaving with three other senior researchers to found Discovery Loop, a new AI startup focused on automating scientific research. Alphabet is a founding investor in the venture.
They follow a string of high-profile departures this year. David Silver, one of DeepMind’s most senior researchers, left in February to start his own company. John Jumper, who shared Hassabis’ Nobel Prize for the AlphaFold protein project, left for rival Anthropic in June. Noam Shazeer, a co-lead on Google’s Gemini model, departed for OpenAI around the same period.
A restructuring already under way
Google has spent recent months overhauling its research operation. It dismantled the Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold team and moved its researchers into divisions working on Gemini, the company’s flagship AI model.
It also assembled an internal group known as ‘Code Strike’ to improve its AI coding tools, an area where it has fallen behind the smaller and younger labs OpenAI and Anthropic.
Hassabis founded DeepMind in London in 2010 and sold it to Google for around £400 million in 2014. The lab built AlphaGo, the first AI system to beat human experts at the board game Go, and AlphaFold, which won Hassabis and Jumper the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024.
Demis has been playing the role of AI statesman for some time — Sebastian Mallaby
Last month Hassabis proposed an industry-led AI standards body modelled on FINRA, the American body that regulates stockbrokers. FINRA is funded by the industry it oversees, not by government.
Sebastian Mallaby, who wrote The Infinity Machine, a biography of Hassabis, said the move formalises an existing arrangement. ‘Demis has been playing the role of AI statesman for some time, and Koray has been running the Google DeepMind research for some time’, he said.
Pichai said he and Hassabis had long discussed ‘a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI’. Hassabis is expected to focus on the societal impact of advanced AI and on shaping future regulation of the technology.
