Hassabis becomes DeepMind chair as Kavukcuoglu takes the operating lead

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis published staff notes on Google's company blog announcing a split between long-range AGI work and day-to-day model shipping.

Hassabis becomes chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. He will keep leading Isomorphic Labs and, in his words, hand over "day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM" so he can focus on "the big picture." He wrote that he feels AGI is "close at hand," and that he will keep advising from DeepMind's London Platform 37 offices.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously DeepMind's chief technology officer and Google's chief AI architect, becomes SVP of Google DeepMind, reporting to Pichai. Pichai said Kavukcuoglu will oversee Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams. Pichai noted Kavukcuoglu has been at DeepMind for 13 years, started its deep learning team, and worked on WaveNet and DQN.

What Google said is already working

Pichai's note listed current momentum: Gemini models "in high demand among developers and businesses," the Gemini app at 950 million-plus monthly users, Flash "in high demand," a live Cyber model, and Gemma models past 900 million-plus downloads. Hassabis repeated the 950 million app figure and called DeepMind "the AI engine room of Google."

Hassabis also said he is "excited about the great progress we're making with our new models including Gemini 4."

Jeff Dean's next step

Pichai said that after a 27-year run, Jeff Dean and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in machine learning, science, and engineering. Alphabet will be a founding investor and Cloud partner, and will keep a research collaboration on ML systems and infrastructure.

How outsiders read the shift

CNBC reported on 12 August 2026 that Kavukcuoglu now leads day-to-day work and reports to Pichai, and that he had already moved from London to Google's Mountain View headquarters in his previous role. A Google spokesperson told CNBC the company remained committed to its presence in London.

CNBC also quoted analysts who framed the change as a tighter focus on frontier model performance and developer tools. Those are outside opinions, not Google's own wording.

Sources: The next chapter of our AI momentum, Google; Google DeepMind: Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over in frontier AI push, CNBC, 12 August 2026.