Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s chief technology officer, will replace Hassabis at the helm of DeepMind, though in a senior vice president position rather than as CEO, Google boss Sundar Pichai wrote in a memo on Wednesday.
Kavukcuoglu had been taking responsibility for the development of Gemini long before Wednesday’s news. In company briefings, Kavukcuoglu would lead Gemini discussions, and Hassabis had been absent from many day-to-day meetings about Gemini, attending only for the most significant ones, one DeepMind employee tells TIME. Meanwhile, Hassabis was regularly present for meetings about post-AGI readiness, safety, and AI governance, the person said, and was spending more of his time working with governments, including attending the recent G7 summit.
Semafor earlier reported that Hassabis had been shifting day-to-day responsibility for Gemini and Google’s consumer AI strategy to Kavukcuoglu for at least a year. Hassabis was not pushed to change roles, the outlet reported, but had struggled to gain satisfaction from a role more focused on business than his main passion, science.
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