Alphabet Drops 4% as DeepMind Elevates Hassabis and Loses 4 Leaders
Updated
Updated · sources.news · Aug 6
Alphabet Drops 4% as DeepMind Elevates Hassabis and Loses 4 Leaders
3 articles · Updated · sources.news · Aug 6
Summary
Alphabet shares fell 4% after Google DeepMind named Demis Hassabis chairman and Alphabet chief scientist, while Koray Kavukcuoglu took day-to-day control of the lab.
Four senior figures are leaving: Jeff Dean after 27 years, plus Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, who are starting Discovery Loop to automate scientific discovery.
Inside DeepMind, staff largely viewed the handover as formalizing an existing reality, with Hassabis's memo saying Gemini was already effectively in Koray's hands.
The bigger internal shift is Hassabis stepping away from chatbot product work and Google's compute-allocation battles, even as outsiders read the departures as a hit to Google's AI bench.