US stocks: Alphabet shares fall 4% as DeepMind chief shifts role in Googleâs AI shakeup
Alphabetâs Class C shares fell 4.32%, or $16.21, to $359.14 on Wednesday after Google announced a sweeping overhaul of its AI leadership. DeepMind CEO Demis
Alphabetâs Class C shares fell 4.32%, or $16.21, to $359.14 on Wednesday after Google announced a sweeping overhaul of its AI leadership. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping away from day-to-day management while several prominent Gemini researchers are leaving the company, according to a Reuters report.The stock opened at $380 and rose to $381.81 before turning sharply lower, touching an intraday low of $355.16.The shakeup comes at a critical time for Google DeepMind. The flagship version of its latest Gemini model remains unreleased despite a planned June launch, raising concerns that Google is falling behind rivals Anthropic and OpenAI. Both companies have also recruited prominent Google AI researchers in recent months.Hassabis, a Nobel laureate, will take the newly created position of Alphabet chief scientist and move from CEO to chairman of Google DeepMind.
In a memo to employees, he said the change would allow him to focus more closely on artificial general intelligence, or AGI.â[Hassabis] and I have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI,â Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai said in a separate companywide memo. âItâs work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I canât imagine a better person than Demis to do it.âGoogle DeepMind Chief Technology Officer Koray Kavukcuoglu will assume day-to-day responsibility for the unit as senior vice president. He will also retain his position as Alphabetâs chief AI architect.Veteran engineers Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le have left Google to launch Discovery Loop, a public-benefit corporation focused on breakthroughs in machine learning, science and engineering.Alphabet did not disclose what prompted the leadership changes or explain their coincidental timing, according to a Reuters report.A Google spokesperson told Reuters that Hassabis, who has long prioritised research over commercial returns, will focus on AGI strategy and its societal implications while overseeing a small team.Hassabis said Google had made âgreat progressâ on its AI models, including an unreleased upgrade called Gemini 4.
He also plans to spend more time at Isomorphic Labs, the DeepMind drug-discovery spinoff that he founded and leads.The overhaul follows setbacks in Googleâs AI product pipeline. The company delayed Gemini 3.5 Pro in July to improve its performance in areas such as coding, according to a Bloomberg report.Despite those concerns, Alphabet has benefited from rapid growth in its AI-driven cloud business. Google Cloud revenue surged 82% to $24.77 billion in the latest quarter,
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