Google needs a win in the AI race. Employees say moving Demis Hassabis into a chief scientist role is the kind of gambit that could deliver one as the industry pushes toward AI that can surpass human intelligence.
Google's shock leadership reshuffle on Wednesday, which saw longtime chief scientist Jeff Dean depart and Hassabis step down as DeepMind CEO, comes at a critical juncture for the search giant.
After riding high in late 2025, the company is trailing the competition in coding — AI's first big commercial takeoff — and continues to postpone its new frontier model.
Placing Hassabis in his new role at Google parent company Alphabet gives it a longer-horizon view that some insiders said could help it make bigger leaps in areas beyond chatbots and coding. Hassabis will also become chair of DeepMind, the company said.
"He doesn't care about chatbots," said one longtime Googler of Hassabis, who was among six current and former employees who spoke to Business Insider. "He wants to use AI to cure cancer."
A Google spokesperson pointed Business Insider to its blog announcing the leadership changes.
Hassabis' balancing act
In recent months, Hassabis has found a new favorite phrase. We are, he likes to say, in "the foothills of the Singularity."
Those five words about the moment when AI substantially overtakes human capabilities offer a clue to what Hassabis thinks is important: helping usher in the next major leap in artificial intelligence.
Hassabis, who cofounded DeepMind in 2010 and sold it to Google four years later, has long been passionate about AI's potential for scientific breakthroughs — even when they aren't an obvious revenue generator for his employer.
He oversaw AlphaFold, an AI system that solved the 50-year-old protein-folding problem, which won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2025, he told The Guardian that, if he had controlled AI's development path, he might have kept it in the laboratory longer to pursue more AlphaFold-like achievements and "maybe cured cancer."
However, after Google fully absorbed DeepMind in 2023, he found himself in a balancing act between pushing the frontiers of AI and helping Google shore up its commercial products with AI. That has at times involved Hassabis wading into company politics to resolve team tensions or focusing on product development that interests him less, Business Insider previously reported.
At times, two insiders said, Hassabis appeared to relent to corporate realities. When Google removed its red lines on building AI for weapons or surveillance — which was marked by a blog post with Hassabis' name on it — it was a direct reversal of a position Hassabis had previously held. The change in stance has caused tensions in the workforce and some departures.
'An incredible new age of discovery and wonder'
Over the past year, Hassabis' attention has moved away from corporate politicking and day-to-day management to the bigger-picture impacts of AI, according to some inside the company.
Google employees have different views on whether the new role will give him more or less influence over these types of issues inside the company, and whether it's a promotion or a demotion.
"I'm not sure I would call it a move up or down," one longtime senior Googler who has worked closely with Hassabis told Business Insider. "I think it's just a move towards what he's passionate about and maybe where the organization needs him."
On Thursday, tech analyst and cofounder of Turing Company, Jiang Liu, responded on X to reports of Hassabis' shift away from CEO duties over the last year, saying it was "actually a good thing."
While the markets didn't like Hassabis' move — Google's stock dropped as much as 6% on the news — it's a "formalization of something that had been happening informally," said Sebastian Mallaby, the author of a biography of Hassabis and DeepMind, in a post on X.
Externally, Hassabis has increasingly become the face of Google's AI efforts, meeting with President Donald Trump and other AI leaders in recent months to discuss his long-running concern: AI safety.
In a note to DeepMind staff shared publicly by Google on Wednesday, Hassabis captured what he sees as the urgency of the moment: "I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand," he wrote. "It's critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder."
Google's brain drain
Google's big bet on moving Hassabis comes amid a talent drain at the company.
Dean said on Wednesday that he and three other top AI researchers, including his longtime Google collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat, were departing to start their own company.
In recent months, Noam Shazeer, a key figure on Google's Gemini work, and John Jumper, one of the scientists behind Alphafold, also departed. Meanwhile, the company keeps delaying its next frontier model, Gemini 3.5 Pro.
Teams inside Google DeepMind have been working to improve Gemini's AI coding capabilities as rivals OpenAI and Anthropic scoop up customers. Google has discussed a deal with AI agent coding startup Mechanize, Business Insider reported this week.
While coding has proven to be AI's first major commercial application, every AI lab is looking to what's next. Freeing Hassabis up to take a longer-term perspective would both satisfy the chess prodigy's interests and help Google get ahead of the next big thing. If the singularity is as close as Hassabis predicts, it will require deep thinking about everything from safety to how compute is allocated.
In response to the news of Google's shuffle, OpenAI's former chief futurist, Joshua Achiam, said he saw the changes as smart bets.
"Being in a leadership role on the next frontier" is more crucial right now, he said in a post on X. This may be the motivating factor behind both Hassabis' move and Dean's departure to form his own AI company, Achiam posited.
"Early AI/AGI/ASI leads will, over the next year, begin leaving what look like important leadership posts to go place their bets on what they think the most important thing will be," he wrote.
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