What changed
2026-08-06 08:46 UTC → 2026-08-06 09:07 UTC ·
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In late Following the July 2026 Alphabet’s DeepMind announced the disbanding of the AlphaFold team that had earned a 2024 Nobel Prize for solving protein folding. Most researchers were reassigned to Gemini‑focused projects in enzyme design, nuclear‑fusion research and genomics, while a smaller group joined the drug‑discovery spin‑off Isomorphic Labs. About a quarter dissolution of the original staff left, including lead scientist John Jumper, who moved to Anthropic. The DeepMind’s AlphaFold protein‑structure database and its licensing remain active. On 5 August 2026 team, Alphabet confirmed carried out a sweeping AI leadership overhaul. reshuffle in early August. Demis Hassabis stepped down as DeepMind CEO to become CEO, becoming chair of DeepMind and Alphabet’s chief scientist, directing his attention toward artificial general intelligence and his work at scientist while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs. Koray Kavukcuoglu was promoted to senior vice‑president of DeepMind, taking operational control charge of the Gemini model line, development, the Gemini app and related developer teams, and will report directly reporting to CEO Sundar Pichai. Jeff Dean left departed after 27 years to co‑found the public‑benefit corporation Discovery Loop with senior researchers Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le; Alphabet will act as be a founding investor and cloud partner. Discovery Loop aims to automate scientific experimentation and later expand into drug discovery and clean‑energy hardware. The Gemini app serves roughly 950 million monthly active users, but the flagship Gemini model launch launch, originally slated for June, remains delayed beyond its planned June rollout. Following the announcements, delayed, and Alphabet’s shares fell about 4‑5 %. Subsequent reports reiterated % on the leadership changes and market reaction, confirming Hassabis’s new chief‑scientist role, Kavukcuoglu’s operational control announcement. Hassabis cited the approaching arrival of Gemini, and Dean’s departure to Discovery Loop. artificial general intelligence as a key driver for his new strategic role.