SAN FRANCISCO — A Nobel Prize-winning pioneer of artificial intelligence is stepping aside from his role leading Google’s work on the technology, as the company faces pressure to keep up in the AI race.
Demis Hassabis co-founded London-based AI lab DeepMind in 2010, then sold it to Google in 2014 where his team continued its research. He was made head of all Google’s work on AI in 2023, after the arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT shook Silicon Valley.
Hassabis will stay at Google but focus his time on using AI to make new scientific breakthroughs, such as creating new pharmaceutical drugs. He shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2024 for DeepMind’s work on predicting how protein molecules fold.
Google’s stock was down around 4 percent Wednesday afternoon following the news. Analysts have questioned whether Google can keep up with younger AI rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
Koray Kavukcuoglu, another longtime Google executive and DeepMind researcher, will lead the company’s AI efforts, Google said in an announcement. Jeff Dean, another veteran Google AI executive, is leaving the company to form a start-up building AI for scientific discovery.
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