Google DeepMind chief scientist leaves to start a business

Google DeepMind is undergoing a major leadership shake-up. Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis will step down from day-to-day operations and become Alphabet's chief scientist; chief scientist Jeff Dean will leave Google after 27 years in office to start his own AI company. CEO-turned-chief scientist Hassabis said the change gave him more time to focus on the "big picture." In a message to employees, he described this as "a critical moment in human history." He also said that he has been pursuing AGI his whole life and now believes that AGI is "near us." He has previously described humanity as "standing at the foothills of the singularity." Hassabis will continue to work closely with Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, to handle "strategic and global AGI affairs," while serving as a consultant to the DeepMind team and devoting more time to Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AI drug development company. He once said that "the primary application of AI should be to improve human health." Technical Director Takes Over Day-to-Day Operations Koray Kavukcuoglu will take over the day-to-day management of Google DeepMind. He previously served as the technical director of DeepMind and the chief AI architect of Google; after becoming the senior vice president of Google DeepMind, he will report directly to Pichai and be responsible for Gemini model development, cutting-edge AI research, Gemini applications and Google’s AI developer platform. Kavukcuoglu joined DeepMind in its early days and has worked with Hassabis for more than 13 years. Pichai said Kavukcuoglu built DeepMind’s deep learning team and drove breakthroughs such as WaveNet and DQN