Alphabet Stock Drops 4% as DeepMind CEO Steps Down and Four Key Engineers Depart

Demis Hassabis shifts to Chairman role while Jeff Dean and three colleagues leave to found Discovery Loop, triggering a 4.03% decline in Alphabet shares.

Woofun AI reports that Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has stepped down from day-to-day management to assume the roles of DeepMind Chairman and Alphabet Chief Scientist, focusing on long-term AI research and Isomorphic Labs. Former DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu will oversee Gemini R&D and delivery, reporting directly to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.

Simultaneously, engineer Jeff Dean departed alongside Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le to co-found Discovery Loop, an entity aiming to automate the entire research process using AI. Google invested in the founding round and will serve as its cloud provider and compute supporter for the first year, maintaining a collaborative relationship rather than retaining the team. Following these announcements, Alphabet stock fell over 5% intraday before closing down 4.03%, though it rose 0.57% in after-hours trading to $364.49.