Hassabis becomes chair of Google DeepMind as Jeff Dean leaves

Sundar Pichai announced the changes in a memo to Google DeepMind staff on August 5, 2026, published the same day on Google's blog. Demis Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and has led it through its 2023 merger with Google Brain, becomes chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. He continues to lead Isomorphic Labs, and Pichai said he will keep advising Kavukcuoglu and the DeepMind teams on models and research.

Who runs Google DeepMind now

Koray Kavukcuoglu steps up from chief technology officer to senior vice president of Google DeepMind, keeping his separate title of Google's chief AI architect. His brief covers Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams. He has been at DeepMind for 13 years, started its deep learning team, and led work on WaveNet, the speech synthesis model, and DQN, an early reinforcement learning system.

The detail that matters is the reporting line. Kavukcuoglu answers to Pichai, so Gemini now runs to the CEO directly rather than through Hassabis.

Hassabis, in his own note, said he is handing over day-to-day operations to concentrate on AGI, meaning machines with broadly human-level intelligence. "I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand," he wrote. He will work from the new Platform 37 offices in London and lean harder into Isomorphic, naming cancer as the kind of disease he wants that work to help cure. His note also cited progress on new models "including Gemini 4," which has not shipped. That launch now belongs to Kavukcuoglu.

Why are Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat leaving

After 27 years at Google, Dean and Ghemawat are starting an independent public-benefit corporation "to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering." Dean became Google's chief scientist when Brain and DeepMind merged in 2023; Ghemawat is a Google Senior Fellow. Alphabet will be a founding investor and a Cloud partner, and Pichai said Google will also collaborate with the new company on a research framework for machine learning systems and related infrastructure.

The departure lands two months after John Jumper, the DeepMind scientist who co-created AlphaFold and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, left for Anthropic in June. Pichai's memo does not mention Jumper.

Does this change Gemini for you

No. There is no new model to switch to and no setting to flip. Pichai did use the memo to talk up the numbers: the Gemini app has passed 950 million monthly users, Gemma downloads have passed 900 million, Flash is in high demand, and "our Cyber model is live." Those figures are Google's own. Anyone waiting on the next Gemini flagship is now waiting on Kavukcuoglu's calendar.

What is still unknown

The new company has no name, and the memo does not say who else is leaving with Dean and Ghemawat. Google has not said how Hassabis will divide his time between advising Google DeepMind and running Isomorphic, or who signs off on Gemini 4's release.