{"id":3604,"date":"2026-08-18T02:15:28","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T06:15:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/?p=3604"},"modified":"2026-08-18T02:15:28","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T06:15:28","slug":"nobel-laureate-demis-hassabis-named-alphabet-chief-scientist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/?p=3604","title":{"rendered":"Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis named Alphabet chief scientist"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/news.cgtn.com\/news\/2026-08-06\/Nobel-laureate-Demis-Hassabis-named-Alphabet-chief-scientist-1PnFOKzQfNm\/img\/08f95d5f675b4703832edc482ca5d2ae\/08f95d5f675b4703832edc482ca5d2ae.png\" alt=\"Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis speaks at a Google I\/O event in Mountain View, California, May 19, 2026. \/VCG\"><\/p>\n<p>Google&#8217;s head of AI, Demis Hassabis, will step down from his current role to become Alphabet&#8217;s chief scientist amid a reshuffling at DeepMind that will also include a key engineer&#8217;s departure.<\/p>\n<p>Hassabis will take on two new titles, Alphabet announced on Wednesday: chair of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet.<\/p>\n<p>The change &#8220;will allow me to focus on long-term strategy, and accelerating scientific breakthroughs, including leaning into my work at Isomorphic to help cure disease,&#8221; Hassabis wrote in a social media post.<\/p>\n<p>Isomorphic Labs is an AI-powered drug discovery lab that spun out from DeepMind in 2021. In 2024, Hassabis won a Nobel Prize in chemistry.<\/p>\n<p>As part of the shake up, DeepMind&#8217;s chief technology officer and chief AI architect Koray Kavukcuoglu will become the division&#8217;s senior vice president and oversee its operations, including the development of Google&#8217;s flagship frontier models and products which are known as Gemini.<\/p>\n<p>Longtime Google engineer Jeff Dean is also leaving the company after nearly three decades to &#8220;try something new, and we&#8217;re excited to support him in that,&#8221; Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post announcing the news.<\/p>\n<p>Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010, and four years later, Google bought the research lab for $650 million, according to reports at the time. His co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, is currently the chief of Microsoft&#8217;s AI segment.<\/p>\n<p>Google is competing for customers alongside other major AI developers including Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, as well as DeepSeek and Moonshot in China.<\/p>\n<p>The industry is also chasing a theoretical milestone known as advanced general intelligence (AGI), which is a point when AI software matches the capabilities of human thinking.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand,&#8221; Hassabis wrote in Wednesday&#8217;s blog post.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;With this backdrop, I&#8217;ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at (Google DeepMind), so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come,&#8221; Hassabis continued.<\/p>\n<p>Observers have been waiting for Google to announce a more powerful version of its AI model, called Gemini 3.5 Pro, which was supposed to launch in June but appears to be delayed.<\/p>\n<p>Its shares closed 4% down Wednesday afternoon.<\/p>\n<p>The leadership changes come amid a wider brain drain at Google.<\/p>\n<p>In June, a top AI and engineering executive, Noam Shazeer, left for OpenAI, while senior researcher John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Hassabis, jumped to Anthropic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google&#8217;s head of AI, Demis Hassabis, will step down from his current role to become Alphabet&#8217;s chief scientist amid a reshuffling at DeepMind that will also include a key engineer&#8217;s departure. Hassabis will take on two new titles, Alphabet announced on Wednesday: chair of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. The change &#8220;will allow me [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":3605,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-noticias"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3604\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}