Google DeepMind Reshuffles After CEO Demis Hassabis Steps Aside

Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s chief technology officer, will replace Hassabis at the helm of DeepMind, though in a senior vice president position rather than as CEO, Google boss Sundar Pichai wrote in a memo on Wednesday. 

Kavukcuoglu had been taking responsibility for the development of Gemini long before Wednesday’s news. In company briefings, Kavukcuoglu would lead Gemini discussions, and Hassabis had been absent from many day-to-day meetings about Gemini, attending only for the most significant ones, one DeepMind employee tells TIME. Meanwhile, Hassabis was regularly present for meetings about post-AGI readiness, safety, and AI governance, the person said, and was spending more of his time working with governments, including attending the recent G7 summit.

“Koray’s philosophy has always been clear: advancing the frontier of AI and building it responsibly are the exact same mission,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “Frontier model safety has lived directly within the Gemini team from the very beginning, under Koray’s leadership. His teams collaborate closely with the safety and policy teams across Google and Google DeepMind, and that will continue.”