Google Is Investing an Unspecified Amount in Discovery Loop and Will Serve As Its Cloud Provider

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping down from his role but will remain with the company as chairman of the unit, a position that did not previously exist. He will also take on the title of chief scientist for Alphabet, Google's parent company, and continue to lead the pharmaceutical spinoff Isomorphic Labs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, the current CTO of Google DeepMind, will become senior VP and report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai, taking over day-to-day operations.

The change comes as Jeff Dean, who held the chief scientist role, leaves to form a startup called Discovery Loop, which will focus on AI models that improve themselves with minimal human help. Google is investing an unspecified amount in Discovery Loop and will serve as its cloud provider. Dean said in an interview with The New York Times, We think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop.

The shakeup follows recent changes at Google's AI arm, including disbanding the AlphaFold team, which Hassabis was part of. AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures and earned a Nobel Prize in chemistry, is used to develop therapies for diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Additionally, Google has announced plans to invest up to $40 billion with Anthropic, with $10 billion already invested in April and $30 billion more contingent on performance milestones.