Demis Hassabis, the driving force behind Google DeepMind, is ascending to the role of chief scientist at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, replacing Jeff Dean who is leaving to work at a start-up.
The role will enable Hassabis to “put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI,” or artificial general intelligence, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on the company’s news/inside-google/message-ceo/next-chapter-ai-momentum/” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>Inside Google blog.
Hassabis’ attention will still be divided, however: He will continue to lead research at Google spin-off Isomorphic Labs, which works on drug discovery, and although he will no longer be CEO of DeepMind, he will be its chair. Koray Kavukcuoglu will take over DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai. He is currently its CTO.
