Sir Demis Hassabis is stepping down as chief executive of Google DeepMind as part of a broader leadership overhaul at the AI research lab. He will become chair of DeepMind and take on a new role as chief scientist at Alphabet, Google's parent company, while Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's chief technology officer, takes over as its leader with the title of senior vice-president. The change comes amid mounting pressure on Google, with investors concerned it is falling behind rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the AI race.

Hassabis, 50, co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and sold it to Google for £400m four years later, later winning the 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry for AlphaFold's breakthroughs in protein structure prediction. He said the move would free him to focus on ensuring artificial general intelligence, which he believes is "close at hand", benefits humanity, and he will remain chief executive of spin-out Isomorphic Labs. Alphabet's shares fell 4% on the news, which also coincided with the departure of veteran Gemini engineers Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, who are leaving to launch a machine learning startup called Discovery Loop.