Demis Hassabis is moving to Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, stepping back from day-to-day operations as Koray Kavukcuoglu takes operational control. Simultaneously, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le are founding Discovery Loop, a Public Benefit Corporation aimed at automating machine learning, science, and engineering.

  • The leadership change positions Hassabis to focus on long-term strategy while Kavukcuoglu oversees Gemini and product teams.
  • Discovery Loop is backed by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, targeting automated discovery loops rather than general-purpose models.
  • Meta released Muse Spark 1.2 and Muse Code (beta), co-trained for better tool use and persistent agent execution.
  • Prime Intellect introduced Prime Agent, an open-source harness using a persistent IPython REPL for programmatic tool calling.
  • Elicit launched a Research Agent with BioDecisionBench results showing 76.7% coverage of key considerations in "Smartest" mode.

This reshuffle signals a governance reset at Google DeepMind and marks AI-for-science as a primary frontier through the new Discovery Loop venture.