Hassabis moves up, Jeff Dean moves out, and DeepMind gets a new boss

Kavukcuoglu takes over Google DeepMind reporting to Pichai. Dean leaves after 27 years to found Discovery Loop with Ghemawat, Vinyals and Le.

Google DeepMind changed leadership on August 5. Demis Hassabis steps back from day-to-day management to become Alphabet's chief scientist, staying in London, advising DeepMind teams and working with Sundar Pichai on strategic and global AGI questions while turning more attention to Isomorphic Labs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind's CTO and Google's chief AI architect, becomes Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai and overseeing Gemini, frontier research and the developer platforms. Hassabis said he has total confidence in him.

The larger departure is Jeff Dean, who is leaving Google entirely after 27 years to launch Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation, alongside Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le. Its stated aim is automating large-scale machine learning experiments first and broader scientific research after. The seed round is led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, Doerr Capital and Alphabet participating. No amount was disclosed.

We card this because it is unambiguously significant and unambiguously dated, and then we score it honestly: it moves no cost curve. Nothing became cheaper or more available today because four researchers changed employers. The thing worth watching is Discovery Loop's premise, since a company whose product is automated research is a bet that discovery itself is about to get cheaper. That would matter enormously. It has not happened yet.

Source: The Decoder