Jeff Dean, head of artificial intelligence at Google LLC, speaks during a Google AI event in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2020.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google’s AI divisions are getting reshuffled, the search giant announced on Wednesday, with chief scientist Jeff Dean leaving the company after 27 years.
Dean, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, is starting his own company, Google said in a blog post on Wednesday. The departure is on friendly terms and Google will invest in his startup, a representative said.
“After an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a note to staff. “Jeff and Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering.”
Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, is moving into a chairman role of that unit. Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently DeepMind CTO and chief AI architect, will take over day-to-day leadership of the AI division and a senior vice president title.
Kavukcuoglu will lead the development of Gemini 4, the company’s next major AI model, and will report to Pichai.
The shakeup comes as Google navigates a rapidly evolving AI industry, with the company trying to compete against OpenAI and Anthropic in developing the most cutting-edge frontier models while also pouring money into infrastructure so that its cloud division can serve customers as well as its own workloads. In the latest quarter, Google turned cash flow negative for the first time on record due to its capital expenditures, while forecasting full-year capex of up to $205 billion.
Dean has been credited with some of Google’s most important technical breakthroughs dating back to 1999, when he joined the company.’
Hassabis co-founded DeepMind and joined Google when Google purchased the lab in 2014. In recent years, he has been leading nearly all of Google’s foundational artificial intelligence work.
“I’ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability,” Hassabis said in a note to employees.
He added he would work with Pichai on “strategic and global” matters related to artificial intelligence.
