Google DeepMind CEO and four other AI leaders step down

(Barrons) August 5 - Alphabet shares dropped on Wednesday after the company announced a big shakeup at its artificial-intelligence division. Demis Hassabis, who shared the Nobel Prize with Jumper, was the CEO of Google’s DeepMind AI lab, and he will step back to become DeepMind’s chairman and Alphabet Chief Scientist. Koray Kavukcuoglu will replace him, but as a senior vice president. Jeff Dean, who was Google’s 30th employee in 1999 and has led much of the company’s artificial-intelligence research over the past 15 years, is leaving the company to start a new firm. Dean’s new company is called Discovery Loop, and it’s aimed at automating science and engineering research. He will be joined by three other Google engineering luminaries: Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat. The four have been responsible for many of the company’s breakthroughs in AI research and computing, and their departures could weigh on Google’s AI efforts, particularly in the near term. They join four other prominent Google AI scientists who left the company in June: Noam Shazeer, Nobel Prize winner John Jumper, Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel. Alphabet’s Gemini artificial-intelligence models have generally been viewed as trailing those from OpenAI and Anthropic, and these moves may be seen as a reflection of Google’s third-place status. The stock was down 4% in midday trading after being up as much as 1.8% earlier in the day. Source: https://www.barrons.com/articles/stock-movers-c5965517