Noam Shazeer helps push frontier AI at Google DeepMind, shaping models and strategies for the race to AGI.
Demis Hassabis has stepped back from day-to-day leadership at Google DeepMind to become chair of DeepMind and chief scientist at Alphabet. Koray Kavukcuoglu will run DeepMind as senior vice-president. Several senior engineers, including Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, have left to found Discovery Loop. Alphabet shares have fallen since the announcements.
Executives are leaving top AI labs for rivals, highlighting a talent war as Google loses senior researchers to Anthropic and OpenAI. The exits come as industry leaders push for faster AI deployment and policy alignment, with investors watching margins amid heavy AI compute spending.
AI researchers push beyond language models toward embodied intelligence. World models aim to teach AI agents to react in physical environments, with robotics data pipelines and real-world testing becoming the focus for the next frontier.