Yesterday late at night, a message popped in an AI enthusiasts whatsapp group I am part of: “Wow huge news at Google. Looks like Hassabis got ousted”.
Indeed, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis is shifting from his role as chief executive of Google DeepMind to become the unit’s chairman, and also taking on the role of chief scientist of Alphabet, a title created just for him, covering long-range AGI strategy (artificial general intelligence: software with broad human-level ability). In his note to staff, Mr Hassabis said the change would give him more time for Isomorphic Labs (the drug-discovery unit which he continues to run as chief executive), and for AGI itself, which he described as close at hand.
Something else was happening around the same time: Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist and a 27-year employee, left the company. He announced the move in a post on X that did not even mention Google.
I made a mental note that this would be a good topic for today’s issue. As I started drafting, though, I realised there is much more behind the announcements, which Google said were unconnected, knowing that it is nearly impossible for the company to time the announcements this way, unless it actually DID want to send the message that they ARE indeed connected.
To understand what is happening, I decided again to take a step back and look at the whole Google AI timeline: starting in 2017 with the release of “Attention Is All You Need”, the research paper that started this whole wave of LLMs (large language models, AI systems trained to generate humanlike text). More about that whole storyline later, but for now, let’s look at the “relatively” recent developments.
14 months earlier
On June 11, 2025, Google created a new role, chief AI architect, and gave it to Koray Kavukcuoglu, who until then was chief technology officer of Google DeepMind. The role sits directly under chief executive Sundar Pichai. Reuters reported that Mr Pichai’s internal memo described the goal as bringing Google’s models into its products faster, with quicker iteration and less duplicated work.
Fast forward to August 5, 2026, as Mr Hassabis moved away from running Google DeepMind day to day, Mr Kavukcuoglu stepped into the job as senior vice president (not chief executive), still reporting directly to Mr Pichai and still holding the chief AI architect title.
The 14 months between those two dates explain more about this week’s news than any of the individual departures do.
Mr Kavukcuoglu’s remit is clear: Gemini model development, frontier research, the Gemini app and Google DeepMind’s developer teams. Axios reported, citing a person familiar with the matter, that Mr Kavukcuoglu had already been more involved than Mr Hassabis in recent model releases.
Within hours, Jeff Dean revealed his new home: Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation (a company with a binding public mission) he had just co-founded to automate scientific research, starting with the machine-learning experiments that improve AI itself. His co-founders are Sanjay Ghemawat, a Google senior fellow and his engineering partner of two decades; Oriol Vinyals, a Google DeepMind vice-president and a Gemini co-lead; and Quoc Le, a co-founder of Google Brain. Alphabet is a founding investor in Discovery Loop and will supply its cloud compute for at least the first year. Wired reported that Mr Pichai tried to keep the group inside Google and failed.
The quarter before
Alphabet shares fell about 5 per cent on the news, erasing an estimated $160bn to $200bn in market value; the stock had rallied 13 per cent from a post-earnings low in the three weeks before.
However three weeks earlier, on July 22, 2026, Alphabet reported its second-quarter results, and the numbers explain some of the logic behind what transpired yesterday. Revenue for the quarter reached $119.8bn, up 24 per cent year on year and ahead of analyst estimates. Google Cloud revenue rose 82 per cent to $24.8bn, while cloud operating income more than tripled to $8.8bn, and cloud operating margin expanded from 20.7 per cent to 35.6 per cent. Cloud’s contracted backlog reached $514bn, up more than $50bn in three months. Nearly 90 per cent of the Fortune 100 now uses Gemini Enterprise, and the Gemini app has 950 million monthly users.
Mr Pichai’s own announcement of the reorganisation, three weeks later, pointed straight back to that quarter, citing momentum at earnings across Search, YouTube and Cloud as part of the case for change.
Brain drain or alumni network
The departures around Mr Kavukcuoglu’s promotion did not start this week, and by some accounts they trace back to the same shift in authority. CNBC reported that Mr Kavukcuoglu had been taking on a broader set of responsibilities from Mr Hassabis for about a year already, including directing model development and presenting major Gemini releases, the same period covering most of the departures below.
David Silver, one of DeepMind’s earliest employees and central to AlphaGo, AlphaZero and reinforcement learning (training AI through trial and reward rather than human examples), left in January 2026 to found Ineffable Intelligence, which has since raised $1.1bn at a $5.1bn valuation in a round Google itself joined.
Noam Shazeer, a Transformer co-author and Gemini co-lead, left for OpenAI on June 18, 2026, less than two years after Google reportedly paid about $2.7bn in 2024 to bring him back from Character.AI, the startup he had left Google to found in 2021.
John Jumper, co-creator of AlphaFold (DeepMind’s protein-structure prediction system) and joint winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Mr Hassabis, followed him to Anthropic on June 19, 2026, after almost nine years at DeepMind.
Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, both Gemini contributors and both AlphaFold alumni, joined him there within weeks.
The pattern reached the team that won that Nobel Prize too. DeepMind had been reassigning AlphaFold’s original researchers since around mid-2025, moving them into Gemini, enzyme design, nuclear fusion, genomics and Isomorphic Labs; by the time the Financial Times reported the full picture and DeepMind confirmed it, on July 29, 2026, almost a quarter of the paper’s original full-time authors had left Google entirely.
DeepMind’s Pushmeet Kohli told the paper the lab’s strategy had moved away from dedicated teams built around single grand challenges. This admission came less than two years after the Nobel Prize award.
A narrower definition of AI research
Analysts describe a consistent pattern in the departures: the people leaving want to do research for its own sake, not build products, and increasingly see Anthropic, OpenAI or a new startup as the place to do it. Mr Kavukcuoglu’s authority has grown on that same logic for a year, getting models into products faster, the same case Mr Pichai made for the reorganisation itself. Put together, the org structure, the financial results and the talent drain describe a company that now runs AI research merely as part of a commercial infrastructure business, rather than treating the business as a side effect of the research.
The bottom line is that Alphabet keeps a stake in research without running it directly: it is funding Mr Dean’s Discovery Loop, a company betting that automating scientific research is itself a business, and keeping Isomorphic Labs separate rather than folding it into Mr Kavukcuoglu’s product-focused organisation.
Background, 2017 to 2023
Eight Google researchers published the paper that introduced the Transformer (the architecture underlying nearly every modern AI model), “Attention Is All You Need,” in June 2017; all of the authors had left Google by August 2023. Google built BERT (a language-understanding system used inside Search), Meena (an early conversational chatbot) and LaMDA (a more advanced chatbot, demonstrated but never released to consumers) on that architecture years before ChatGPT existed, yet released none of them as a mass-market product. OpenAI, applying the same architecture, released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Google merged Google Brain and Google DeepMind into a single unit under Mr Hassabis in April 2023, then spent roughly $2.7bn in 2024 to license Character.AI’s technology and bring Mr Shazeer back. He left again in 2026.
Wirelessly yours,
Ziad Matar
Co-founder, Tokenando
Editor-in-chief, The Compute
After Hours
This week: three films about people finding their footing, almost back to back. The Intern pairs Robert De Niro’s 70-year-old widower, back at work as an intern at a fashion startup founded by Anne Hathaway’s character, a boss half his age. Spider-Man: No Way Home put three generations of Peter Parker on screen together, the older two guiding the youngest through a crisis they had already lived. Spider-Man: Brand New Day flips it: no mentors, a world that has forgotten him, and Peter working it out alone.
Also rediscovered Dido this month, and, as usual, fell down a small rabbit hole. From Eminem’s “Stan“ sampling the opening of her “Thank You“, to her Live 8 performance in Hyde Park in 2005, singing “Thank You“ together with Youssou N’Dour, then an amazing performance of N’Dour’s own “7 Seconds“, his duet with Neneh Cherry that topped the French charts for 16 weeks back in 1994.
Cooking took centre stage in my daily routine this week: classic cheese burgers with sautéed mushroom and onions, followed by an air-fried chicken version the next day, beef stroganoff with meatballs inspired by a Rick Stein recipe yesterday, and salmon a la plancha the way Gordon Ramsay would do it for lunch today. Next on the menu: an attempt at ramen… stay tuned!
References
Google names insider Kavukcuoglu to lead AI-powered product development. Reuters, via AOL. June 11, 2025. https://www.aol.com/news/google-names-insider-kavukcuoglu-lead-183430182.html
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping aside. Axios. August 5, 2026. https://www.axios.com/2026/08/05/google-deepmind-demis-hassabis-ai
Google’s AI leadership shuffle. Axios. August 6, 2026. https://www.axios.com/2026/08/06/googles-ai-leadership-shuffle
Demis Hassabis steps down from Google DeepMind CEO role amid a major AI leadership shake-up. Fortune. August 5, 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/08/05/demis-hassabis-steps-down-google-deepmind-ai-shakeup/
Google is expanding its AI empire, and losing the people who built it. CNBC. August 5, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/05/google-is-expanding-its-ai-empire-and-losing-the-people-who-built-it.html
The next chapter of our AI momentum. Google. August 5, 2026. https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/next-chapter-ai-momentum/
4 of Google’s Top AI Brains Are Leaving and Launching Their Own AI Startup. Wired. August 5, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/jeff-dean-google-discovery-loop-startup/
Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings takeaways. CNBC. July 22, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/22/google-earnings-q2-goog-live-updates.html
Alphabet Announces Second Quarter 2026 Results. Alphabet Investor Relations. July 22, 2026. https://s206.q4cdn.com/479360582/files/doc_financials/2026/q2/2026q2-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf
Google Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer leaves for OpenAI. CNBC. June 18, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/18/google-gemini-co-lead-noam-shazeer-leaves-for-openai.html
John Jumper to leave Google DeepMind for Anthropic. CNBC. June 19, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/19/john-jumper-to-leave-google-deepmind-for-anthropic.html
DeepMind’s David Silver just raised $1.1B to build an AI that learns without human data. TechCrunch. April 27, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/27/deepminds-david-silver-just-raised-1-1b-to-build-an-ai-that-learns-without-human-data/
Deepmind dismantles its AlphaFold team as key authors leave for Anthropic. The Decoder. July 29, 2026. https://the-decoder.com/deepmind-dismantles-its-alphafold-team-as-key-authors-leave-for-anthropic/