I read Sundar Pichai's announcement twice before I caught which line was actually the news. It wasn't "Demis Hassabis is leaving." It was who sits in his seat every day while he moves up a floor.
Fact
The facts: on August 5, Sundar Pichai announced that Koray Kavukcuoglu was promoted to senior vice president of Google DeepMind and reports directly to him. Kavukcuoglu takes over the Gemini models, frontier AI research, the Gemini app and the developer teams. Demis Hassabis becomes Chairman of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, and continues to lead Isomorphic Labs. The same announcement also revealed Jeff Dean's departure.
Hassabis isn't disappearing from the scene. He's just stepping away from the wheel day to day. The title stays impressive, the science stays his, Isomorphic Labs stays his. But the daily operational power moves to someone else.
Kavukcuoglu takes over exactly the parts that make the news every day - the Gemini models themselves, frontier research, the app people actually touch, and the teams that build for outside developers - in other words, the operational control panel of Gemini.
The same letter where Hassabis steps down from daily management also announces that Jeff Dean is leaving Google. He went off to do something else - I cover that separately.
"I've decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM." - Demis Hassabis
Who's actually in charge
Chairman looks impressive on any business card. The control panel for Gemini that people use every day is now in Kavukcuoglu's hands. Where Gemini goes next we'll know from his decisions, not from anyone's business card.
Sources
Google - Message from the CEO: the next chapter of our AI momentumFortune - Demis Hassabis steps down as Google DeepMind's operational chiefThe visual is generated code-art, no third-party images.