Google has continued to see major changes to its senior leadership roster, with a combination of internal shifts as well as exiting top employees.

On August 5, Google CEO Sundar Pichai shared a post where he outlined some of these transitions and re-affirmed his commitment to the company’s advanced AI goals.

First and foremost, Google DeepMind’s former CEO Demis Hassabis announced that he would be taking on a “new strategic role” as the Chair of GDM, as well as the Chief Scientist of Alphabet.

“He’ll be able to dedicate his time and focus on shaping the future of AGI and scientific discovery. It’s work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can’t imagine a better person than Demis to do it,” said Mr. Pichai about the change in roles, noting that Mr. Hassabis would stay closely connected to the GDM teams.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, the current Chief Technology Officer of GDM and the company’s Chief AI Architect, is slated to be the SVP of Google DeepMind. He will report directly to Mr. Pichai.

However, Google DeepMind and Google Research’s Chief Scientist, Jeff Dean, is set to leave Google after 27 years, in order to start his own public benefit corporation with former co-worker Sanjay Ghemawat.

Mr. Pichai confirmed that Google will support the project as a founding investor and Cloud partner.

The sudden departures have caught the attention of the sector, with many interpreting Mr. Hassabis’ transition as a demotion or “stepping down” of sorts.

However, these are not the only Google executives who have changed their job descriptions in recent months.

In the last week of June, Bloomberg reported that researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel were leaving the search giant in order to join Anthropic, the AI firm backed by Google and Amazon.

On June 18, AI researcher Noam Shazeer announced on social media that he was looking forward to joining OpenAI.

Around the same time, Google DeepMind director John Jumper — who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Demis Hassabis — announced that he would join Anthropic after taking a break.

Published - August 07, 2026 08:33 am IST