Google just reorganized the top of its AI effort, and Jeff Dean is leaving after 27 years. Sundar Pichai announced the changes in a memo to Google DeepMind, the team behind Gemini, titled "The next chapter of our AI momentum." The timing is notable: the same memo says the Gemini app has passed 950M monthly users.

Three seats changed in one note.

Demis Hassabis steps back from daily operations

Demis Hassabis is handing over day to day operations at Google DeepMind. His new roles are Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, and he continues to lead Isomorphic Labs.

The memo frames this as a move toward the long game. Pichai writes that Demis "has described us as standing in the foothills of the singularity," and the new role lets him put his full attention on shaping the future of AGI. In his own note, Demis says he has always believed the number one application of AI should be improving human health, to help finally cure diseases like cancer. That work runs through Isomorphic Labs.

Koray Kavukcuoglu now runs Google DeepMind

Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously CTO of Google DeepMind and Google's Chief AI Architect, steps up as SVP of Google DeepMind and reports directly to Sundar Pichai. Over his 13 years there he started the deep learning team and led breakthroughs like WaveNet and DQN.

He now oversees Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams. In practice, the person who owns the models now also owns the product most people use them through. Demis's note also confirms what is coming next: he writes that he is excited about "the great progress we're making with our new models including Gemini 4." No date was given.

Jeff Dean leaves after 27 years

The biggest surprise is Jeff Dean. He is one of the engineers behind the systems that made Google work at scale, from its early search infrastructure onward. After 27 years, he and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering.

Google is not cutting ties. It will be a founding investor and Cloud partner, and the two sides plan to collaborate on research into ML systems and infrastructure.

Why it matters

For users, nothing changes tomorrow. Gemini keeps shipping. The signal is in the structure: Google is putting product and model development under one leader who reports to the CEO, while its most famous scientist moves to AGI strategy and health. The memo does not name Dean's new company or say when it launches, so watch for that next.

Read the full memo: The next chapter of our AI momentum (Google)