A "pioneering scientist" is leaving Google's AI lab. The lab will also have a new director.

Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google's artificial intelligence lab DeepMind, is leaving the company after 27 years. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, Google's parent company, announced this in a blog post on the company's website.

In addition, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis will step down from his position and instead become the lab's chairman and a senior scientist at Alphabet, Pichai said.

Alphabet shares reacted negatively to the news: they fell by about 4% during trading on August 5.

Jeff Dean, along with his colleague Sanjay Ghemavath, decided to establish their own independent public benefit corporation to accelerate innovation in machine learning, science, and engineering, Pichai said. Dean and Google are parting ways on good terms, and the company is investing in the former employee’s startup, a Google spokesperson said in a comment to CNBC. The network called Dean “a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence.”

“Jeff and Sanjay played a key role in some of the most significant technological transitions—from our early search infrastructure to the neural networks that helped usher in the modern era of artificial intelligence. [...] We will continue to work with them as a founding investor and cloud partner,” Pichai wrote.

Demis Hassabis, one of the founders of DeepMind, will assume the role of chairman of the lab. Most of his responsibilities will be taken over by Google DeepMind’s chief technology officer and lead AI architect, Koray Kavukcuoglu, according to Bloomberg. Kavukcuoglu will become a senior vice president at Google DeepMind, reporting directly to Suchai. He will oversee the development of the Gemini AI, including its application, as well as AI research.

Hassabis told employees that he is stepping back from day-to-day management in order to focus on the “big picture” and influence the direction of an increasingly powerful “general artificial intelligence,” according to the Financial Times.

Google is losing some of its most distinguished “AI veterans” as part of “seismic” shakeups that are calling into question the company’s leadership in the AI field at a time when competition is intensifying, Bloomberg reports. The change in DeepMind’s leadership means the lab will become further integrated into Google’s business, the Financial Times suggested.

In late July, DeepMind disbanded the Nobel Prize-winning team, the FT reported. The team had created the AlphaFold AI system, which could predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins and accelerate drug development. In June, one of the project leaders—Google DeepMind Vice President John Jumper— left AlphaFold. He announced his move to Anthropic, the world’s most valuable AI startup. Even before that, one of Google’s leading researchers, Noam Shazir, announced his move to OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor