What Google’s AI Shake-Up Means for Pichai Succession

A flood of June-quarter earnings updates—from the likes of Uber, DoorDash, Shopify and Disney—was interrupted on Thursday by Google’s announcement that its AI guru, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, had been elevated to chair of the AI unit and chief scientist of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. That news coincided with the revelation that several others from DeepMind, including Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, were leaving to start their own firm. Some interpreted the shake-ups as bad news for Google, whose stock fell 4%.

In reality, today’s news doesn’t mean much. Hassabis wasn’t the one running DeepMind on a day-to-day basis. That was really Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's Chief Technology Officer, who is now formally taking the reins of Google DeepMind. (For more on Kavukcuoglu, see this profile we published a year ago.) Hassabis, in contrast, is the public face of Google DeepMind as well as a visionary scientist, roles he will continue to perform (he’s a Nobel Prize winner, don’t forget). As for Dean, my colleague Erin Woo tells me the chatter internally is that Dean had become less central to Google’s Gemini efforts, even if he remains revered by employees.