Google leadership changes with Jeff Dean out, Demis Hassabis role change and more

Google is making some big leadership changes with Jeff Dean leaving Google after 27 years and Demis Hassabis changing roles within the company. Most of these changes impact the AI side of Google, including DeepMind and the Gemini teams, but it also may impact Google Search.

Google announced these changes on the company blog and you can imagine, there is an intense amount of coverage from news outlets on these changes – see Techmeme.

The changes. Here are highlights of the changes:

• Jeff Dean who has been with Google for 27 years, being one of the first 30 or so employees, is leaving Google. He is starting his own company named Discover Loop, to seek AI-powered breakthroughs in drug discover, chip design and more. Jeff Dean was instrumental in building the early Google Search but also instrumental in most of its upgrades throughout the year, including RankBrain, AI Overviews, AI Mode and much more.
• Demis Hassabis is stepping down as Google DeepMind’s CEO and will become the chair of that department and “Alphabet chief scientist.” Supposedly, Demis has been stepping back from his CEO role for a year now, wanting to work more on AGI and future AI developments.
• Koray Kavukcuoglu will lead Google DeepMind as its SVP, reporting to Sundar Pichai.
• Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals a DeepMind VP and Quoc Le, a Google Brain co-founder are leaving to go with Jeff Dean to Discover Loop

Why this matters. Everyone wants to know what impact this will have on Google, Google Search, Gemini and the company overall. Google’s stock price, if it is any indication, was down 4% yesterday on the news.

But ultimately, Google has a lot of brain power, so we will see how future Gemini, Google Search and other product releases are impacted over time.