Observers express concern that the division has lost its independence and commercial reality has taken over
When Sir Demis Hassabis said AI had brought the world to a “pivotal moment in human history” last month, he knew another big change was imminent.
This shift was closer to home. The Nobel prize-winning head of Google DeepMind, Google’s AI unit, announced this week he was relinquishing his day-to-day duties as chief executive and becoming chair. He is also taking on the role of chief scientist at DeepMind’s parent, Alphabet.
Hassabis and DeepMind have been key players in AI’s breakthrough era. The 50-year-old co-founded DeepMind and sold it to Google in 2014, which gave him the resources to oversee a number of advances.
These included building the AlphaGo system that mastered the Chinese board game Go and developing AlphaFold, a programme that predicts the 3D structure of proteins. The latter resulted in Hassabis being jointly awarded the 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry.
A former Google executive said the leadership overhaul showed London-based DeepMind being brought firmly into the orbit of its parent in Mountain View, California. DeepMind will now be run by Hassabis’s longstanding colleague, the US-based Koray Kavukcuoglu, who will take the non-CEO role of senior vice-president of DeepMind.
“The era of DeepMind as an independent actor is over and the obvious sign of that is you have gone from a charismatic founder-leader to appointing Koray in a non-CEO leadership role. Koray is a technical character, not an inspirational figure like Demis,” said the former executive.
The ex-Google employee added that it would be “galling” for Google and Hassabis that the latest iterations of Google’s flagship AI model series, Gemini, have lost ground to rival models developed by its US rivals Anthropic and OpenAI.
Hassabis has said he was looking forward to focusing more on the “big picture” for AI and believed he was handing over operational management of a unit that was well placed for the competitive battles ahead.
Internally, DeepMind is a workplace where there have been political tensions. Employees who spoke to the Guardian said there was internal disquiet over the company’s work with the Pentagon. Earlier this year, a former Google DeepMind employee launched a legal challenge against Google, claiming they were unfairly dismissed for their views on Gaza.
That employee was involved in unionisation efforts at Google DeepMind, which have taken place against a backdrop of concern that Google’s AI could assist militaries, including the Israel Defense Forces. Another Google DeepMind employee resigned from the company in mid-July, citing Google’s work with the Pentagon and the US Department of Homeland Security.
One said to the Guardian that Hassabis’s departure was the “end of an era”.
“Now the person we were supposed to trust to get the right outcomes for humanity has stepped away,” they said. Google DeepMind “has become just another subdivision of Google”, they added.
Rosa Curling, the executive director of Foxglove, a campaign group that supported the Google DeepMind employee in their legal challenge, said: “The departure of the co-founder of a company that once prided itself on its ethical credentials is likely to cause further concern among its frontier AI staff about how their work will end up being used in the real world.”
Google has said it is committed to the “private and public sector consensus” that AI should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry without “appropriate human oversight”. While Google has declined a voluntary union recognition agreement in London, it has said it valued “the constructive and direct dialogue that we have with our employees about building a positive and successful workplace”.
