Google hit by earthquake, its top minds Jeff Dean and Demis Hassabis no longer in driving seats

Google's AI leadership has undergone one of its biggest shake-ups yet, with Jeff Dean leaving after 27 years and Demis Hassabis stepping away from the CEO role at Google DeepMind. The changes come as Google battles fierce competition from OpenAI and Anthropic in the race to build the next generation of AI.

In Short

• Jeff Dean quits Google after 27 years to launch AI startup Discovery Loop
• Demis Hassabis leaves DeepMind CEO role, becomes Alphabet Chief Scientist
• Google reshuffles AI leadership amid intensifying competition from OpenAI and Anthropic

Google's AI division is going through one of its biggest leadership shake-ups in years. Within days, the company has seen two of its most influential AI figures step away from the roles that made them the public faces of Google's AI ambitions. Jeff Dean, one of Google's earliest employees and the engineer behind many of its foundational technologies, has announced he is leaving the company after 27 years. At the same time, Demis Hassabis is giving up the CEO role at Google DeepMind to move into a research position at Alphabet.

While neither move means the leaders are walking away from AI altogether, it leaves Google entering one of the most intense phases of the AI race without two of the people who have long been steering the ship.

The timing is especially important. Google is trying to catch up with rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic after facing delays in rolling out some of its next-generation AI models like Gemini 3.5 Pro. Against that backdrop, losing one AI icon and reshuffling another has sparked questions about how the company plans to regain momentum.

Jeff Dean's exit ends a 27-year Google chapter

Jeff Dean isn't just another senior executive leaving Google. He joined the company in 1999 as roughly its 30th employee, when Google was still a tiny startup with only a couple of dozen people.

Over nearly three decades, Dean helped build many of the technologies that powered Google's rise. Alongside longtime collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat, he co-created systems such as MapReduce and Bigtable, technologies that became the backbone of modern large-scale computing. Later, he played a central role in Google Brain, Gemini and several of Google's AI research efforts.

Announcing his departure on X, Dean said, "Tomorrow will be my last day at Google after 27 years... It has been an absolute pleasure to work with you and to help build some of the most widely used and impactful products of all time."

He also added that watching Google grow from around 25 employees to more than 190,000 had been an "amazing journey." Dean also said it still brings him joy to see billions of people using Google's products every day, from Search and Gmail to AI systems and autonomous vehicles.

But retirement is not on the cards. Instead, Dean is launching a new AI startup called Discovery Loop with Google's top software engineer Sanjay Ghemawat, DeepMind research leader Oriol Vinyals and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le. In other words, some of the top AI minds at Google have joined hands to create a new company.

This new company plans to build AI systems that can automate scientific and engineering research by proposing, running and evaluating thousands of experiments with minimal human intervention.

The startup has already secured backing from investors including Khosla Ventures, while Google itself will remain a supporting investor and provide cloud infrastructure during its early stages.

According to a report from The WIRED, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai held several meetings in an attempt to convince Dean and his colleagues to stay. Ultimately, the team decided they wanted the speed and freedom that comes with building a startup.

Demis Hassabis moves upstairs

While Jeff Dean is leaving, Demis Hassabis is taking on a very different role inside Alphabet.

Hassabis will no longer serve as CEO of Google DeepMind. Instead, he has been appointed Alphabet's Chief Scientist while also becoming Chair of Google DeepMind. The day-to-day leadership of DeepMind will now be handled by former Chief Technology Officer Koray Kavukcuoglu, who will report directly to Sundar Pichai.

The move places Hassabis in a strategic position focused on long-term AI research rather than running DeepMind's operations. Essentially, Hassabis wants to focus on tackling bigger questions around AI and research instead of creating coding tools and AI chatbots that can compete with OpenAI or Anthropic.

Pichai, announcing the leadership changes, said the company must "accelerate" its AI work while continuing to push the frontiers of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and scientific discovery.

Why this matters for Google

Taken individually, either announcement would have attracted attention. Together, they represent one of the biggest changes to Google's AI leadership in recent memory.

Dean's departure is particularly big because of the experience walking out the door with him. Beyond his own contributions, Discovery Loop is being founded by four of Google's most respected AI researchers, creating a rare concentration of talent outside the company.

The WIRED described the four founders as some of Google's brightest AI minds, arguing that their departure is a major loss for the company as it competes with OpenAI and Anthropic. This is because their ambition is equally bold, building AI that doesn't simply assist scientists but also acts as a researcher capable of generating new ideas and accelerating discoveries in areas such as biology, chip design, material design and drug development.

So, Google is now in a challenging position because it now has to prove it can continue competing at the highest level of AI while one legendary engineer leaves to build the next big thing and another steps away from operational leadership.

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