Demis Hassabis will stepping down as CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of Google DeepMind, and will instead occupy the role of Chairman, as per reports on Wednesday. Google's Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, will be leaving the firm along with another executive in Google's AI space to start their own enterprise.
"(Hassabis) and I have been long discussing a ​role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI," Alphabet's CEO Sundar Pichai said in a companywide memo cited by Reuters.
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. "It's work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can't imagine a better person than Demis to do it," he added.
This development comes after the delay in Google rolling out the latest version of it flagship Gemini AI model series which was planned to launch in June, leading to speculation from industry figures and investors as to whether the company is lagging behind its peers such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Hassabis will be Google's parent company Alphabet's Chief Scientist, while continuing to serve as the CEO of Isomorphic Labs, the firm's AI-driven drug discovery firm, founded by Hassabis.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, will serve as Google DeepMind's vice president, reporting directly to Hassabis. Kavukcuoglu was initially the firm's chief technology officer.
Hassabis claimed in an internal memo that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) was "close at hand".
"It's critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder," he said.
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Jeff Dean left the company along with AI researchers and engineers Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and ​Quoc Le to found a startup known as Discovery Loop, which he described as focusing on AI-related scientific discovery that are less oriented around a profit incentive.
"We might make decisions that are not necessarily in the company's purist financial interests," The New York Times quoted him as saying.
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