Google moves Hassabis above DeepMind operations

Google moved Demis Hassabis into two strategic roles—Google DeepMind chair and Alphabet chief scientist—while Koray Kavukcuoglu takes operational control of a model organization whose Gemini app now exceeds 950 million monthly users. Sundar Pichai’s announcement also says Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are leaving after Dean’s 27 years at Google to form an independent public-benefit company, with Google as a founding investor and cloud partner. The reorganization makes the talent-retention pressure examined in Google’s AI talent moat concrete: builders should track whether Gemini’s release cadence changes as model delivery passes to a new operator and senior research talent moves outside the company.