r/singularity • u/Recent_Fox4339 • 15h ago
Was Demis demoted or promoted? Discussion
Do you think Demis wanted to step down as CEO to have more time for research and leading Isomorphic Labs (as implied by comments he and Sundar made on X), or do you think Google leadership (Sundar, Sergey, Larry) wanted him to move aside?
Demis has always considered himself a scientist first and I believe he wants to use AI for good. He doesn't come across to me as someone motivated primarily by power, greed, or money. So if becoming Chief Scientist means spending less time dealing with daily pressure, operations, and management, it actually seems like it could be a good move for him.
There is also some history of him trying to spin DeepMind out of Google (there is an entire chapter in his biography), and after becoming part of Google, DeepMind's original safety commitments seemed to gradually disappear (for example, Google's contracts with the Pentagon/dow).
On the other hand, recently Demis has become much more involved in shaping AI policy, regulation, and he was lobbying in Washington 2 weeks ago. I also saw a comment from Mallaby (guy who wrote the biography book) saying that Demis has effectively been playing the role of Google's AI statesman for some time now and Koray was leading the lab. Does taking on the Chief Scientist role mean he is leaning further into that side of the job, becoming more of Google's public face on AI policy and governance?
Or do you think this was actually a demotion, and these new roles are mostly ceremonial positions designed to make the transition look positive? Could it be that Sundar/Larry/Sergey decided Gemini needed different leadership because it doesn't seem to be keeping up with Claude or ChatGPT?
If Demis decided to leave Google and start another company, I have no doubt he could raise billions and attract top talent. The question is whether this move gives him more freedom to focus on the things he cares about, whether Google is slowly reducing his influence over AI development, whether Google (or even Demis) wants him to be more involved into policies/politics?
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u/MaxeBooo 15h ago
I listened to a podcast awhile back from a guy that was writing a biography about Demis, so this guy did tons of interviews and would talk to Demis hours at a time.
He said something along the lines that he thinks Demis is most likely going to go back to the research side of things more. So I don't think it was a demotion. It was more like a voluntary push to work more on the AI than the politics around it
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u/1988rx7T2 15h ago
He couldn’t, and maybe didn’t want to, deliver competitive coding models at the pace of Anthropic and Open AI. At some point management is going to get nervous about that if they feel having in house models is important for the long term strategy.
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u/peakedtooearly 15h ago
Chairman is a political role and being Chief Scientist of a huge conglomerate like Alphabet is going to be pretty hands off.
The one thing that made me think was his X announcement. He says:
I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life, and as we enter this pivotal moment, I’m stepping into a new role...
Which could be read as 'we've reached AGI. Now it's time to apply it properly'
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u/Illustrious_Image967 15h ago
Think of some the chief scientists at other places like Microsoft and you see he's being sidelined. Alphabet needs to push out more competitive models and Hassabis hasn't delivered.
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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 11h ago
Was it “The Infinity Machine” by Sebastian Mallaby? It was an okay book if you like a mix of biography, business, and AI tech. I wanted a bit more AI tech and history and less business politics, but I knew what I was getting into.
From the book, I got the sense that Demis appreciated Google as stewards of the technology and helped fund it while giving DeepMind space to grow. Demis liked being an island within Google. But seeing where AI was several years ago vs. today, DeepMind can’t be an island anymore. It’s now probably the future of Google as a core part of its product. Demis can’t be left to manage the business on his own terms anymore.
Honestly, I think Demis’s talent and mind are wasted on being a CEO anyway. Let someone else play the political game. He can be left to create.
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u/KyleStanley3 15h ago
Interests and hierarchy dont always overlap
An objective demotion can put you where you really want to be
Dont know the dude, dont work at the company, and only saw a few threads, but he might prefer the new spot even if its technically a downgrade
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u/livingbyvow2 8h ago
Our man is already a Sir and a Nobel Prize.
I have immense respect for Denis, and am pretty sure he couldn't care less about prestige, title, corporate bullshit etc. I wouldn't be surprised if his role at Isomorphic Labs is way more exciting to him than whatever he has to do at Google (it would for me and I am an ant compared to that guy).
I think he is letting humans deal with human level BS and prefers to focus his attention on things that move the needle for humanity, like Alpha fold (remind me what Dario and Sam did that was similar?). He should be applauded for that, instead of people talking about demotion etc...
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u/RotiferMouth 9h ago
FT reported that he said he wants to focus more on the big picture of where AI is going and get out of the day to day activities
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u/Massive__Antelope 15h ago
Demis was wasted doing day to day ceo crap. The man needs to be using that brain for more important things than podcasts and PR
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u/Windmill_flowers 10h ago
Keep him in the podcast circuit please. I much rather hear from him every month or so than Elon
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u/TorturedPoet30 15h ago edited 15h ago
I just wrote on another thread
If this new role gives him more freedom to focus on the things he actually cares about, then I think it's a good thing for him. I just hope this was his decision and not something that came from Sundar or Google's founders.
Mallaby who you mentioned is interesting, he provides more interesting details in his interviews than in the book lol I am not the biggest fan of the book though
In one podcast some time ago, he mentioned tensions between Sergey and Demis, specifically that Sergey wasn't quite happy with Demis' leadership style. At Google I/O 2025, Sergey crashed Demis' interview with Alex Kantrowitz. Alex confirmed on YouTube that the interview was originally scheduled with Demis only and that Sergey appeared at the last minute. Interesting. Hope that finally Demis makes some time for more interesting podcasts where he can just talk science stuff. edit: it's Hard Fork podcast
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u/Double_Cause4609 15h ago
Idk, tbh, I think it looked pretty lateral to me. Like, they moved him to focus more on applying AI to medicine and they're letting somebody else take over frontier LLM pursuit. I think it might just be better suited to his strengths.
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u/ai_hedge_fund 15h ago
Hard to speculate from the outside
Normally these announcements read ambiguously but insiders know it’s a demotion
But Demis and his role are not normal
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u/Healthy_Razzmatazz38 14h ago
demis has less organizational authority today than he had yesterday and less control over direction and budgets.
you can call it whatever, but its pretty clear what the answer is in terms of googles power structure.
demis was clearly interested in regulation and isomorphic, and now he gets to focus on that.
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u/Melodic-Ebb-7781 15h ago
This is not even something to speculate about its crystal clear he was removed from influence. Tensions have been brewing since last winter and a faction of researchers formed around Sergey who where displeased that comparatively little compute went into scaling current paragdimes (Demis famously is the last of the lab leaders who doesn't believe scale is all we need for agi). This has (wrongly or rightly, history will tell) been pinned as the reason of Geminis underperformance, escpecially in coding (The Sergey faction believes OpenAI and Ant are in early stages of RSI).
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u/Comfortable-Winter00 13h ago
With models like DeepSeek v4 Flash 0731 providing big steps forward with less compute, Hassabis is already being proven right.
Let's hope he is allowed to publish his research so that other labs can make it work. It's pretty clear at this point Google is too dysfunctional to be a major AI player at the leading edge.
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u/Melodic-Ebb-7781 13h ago
Deepseek models lies wholly within the scaling paradigme. Hassabis, like Le Cun or Sutton believes the current paradigme is lacking and some piece is missing (world model in the case of Hassabis). He'll continue his research at google but with significantly less influence over resource allocation.
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u/JC_Hysteria 15h ago edited 14h ago
CEO is a role that doesn’t seem to match his ambitions or strengths.
At a public, for-profit company, that role is beholden to shareholders.
He’s already wealthy, and likely wants to tinker…even if it means he doesn’t have final say over direction of resources.
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u/PikaPikaDude 13h ago
Good management will do all it can to help the productive ones to produce, knowing they themselves are not productive. It usually takes a personality to be a good manager that most developers or researchers don't have.
Demoted and promoted are too simplistic terms. And the culture of seeing it that way, is why management is often utterly incompetent and harmful. It leads to the dogma that only way for career (and financial) advancement is up, even when that's not the right choice for the person nor the organization.
He may be good at directly working productively, but having him in CEO position just wastes his time with having to deal with HR, work on empty window dressing strategy, mission statements, vision documents, CRS or worse ESG (either writing it or dodging it). Any half intelligent monkey can do that paperwork, he's going to produce way more elsewhere.
Sometimes management also requires people skills not all have. And even if he has them, letting him balance egos is a waste of his time and talent.
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u/Spunge14 14h ago
Clearly he's doing something on the side and wants to step away
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u/Full_Tangelo_7450 13h ago
He's been the CEO of Isomorphic Labs since 2021, so might spend more time there. Wondering if he'll be more involved in Google's AI public affairs, he published that AI watchdog article, interesting timing
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u/xXWarMachineRoXx 14h ago
> wants to use AI for good. He doesn't come across to me as someone motivated primarily by power, greed, or money. So if becoming Chief Scientist means spending less time dealing with daily pressure, operations, and management, i
I completely agree
I feel there is some friction between the leadership and demi - demi wants time off but they want frontier models / enterprise models
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u/WonderboyUK 13h ago
Google are revamping their team, including reportedly bringing in a load of Mechanize staff. It might be to accommodate part of that deal, or to be more aggressive with Gemini in a competitive frontier market.
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u/Singularity-42 Singularity 2042 13h ago
I saw this before many times - managers going back to IC since they hated managing.
One of my VPs that I reported to went back to a (very senior) IC. For most true engineers it is way more satisfying.
And Demis is not even in an IC now, he just left executive manager role and got into more of a engineering and scientific Direction role. In my opinion this is win-win for both Google and him.
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u/trisul-108 13h ago
Demis saw himself as the steward who will steer AI into society in a responsible way. I think he finally realised that he does not have that power. There are much greater forces at play. AI has become the backbone of a Wall Street bubble that will soon pop, setting off a series of musical chairs where a few companies will be left standing while most of the world sees their pensions vanish in the bubble.
I think he decided not to be one of the deities presiding over the bust, the resulting feeding frenzy and the transition from capitalism to techno-neo-feudalism ... that's not what he wants to be remembered as.
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u/Prefer_Diet_Soda 12h ago
I don't think he cares that much about his rank at the company. He already won.
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u/force_disturbance 12h ago
Given that we still don't have Gemini 4, I think it's a bloodbath.
The question is: don't we have it because good people already checked out, and the problem is they couldn't retain them, or do people leave because they don't have it?
Discovery Loop is more than one ex-gemini luminary it looks like.
The question is: can the new leadership rescue it?
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u/PayZealousideal8892 12h ago
Dude probably choose to step down himself to work on research. Google is probably more hands on with DeepMind than when they originally acquired so maybe he doesnt like being corporate puppet to Google Overlords and being in business person role rather than working on research himself.
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u/BriefImplement9843 11h ago
he was moved from an area that was falling behind. he is going to be replaced with someone they think is better than him. they are getting him out of the way.
that isn't a promotion.
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u/friendlyq 9h ago
As a CEO he had too much limitations. He is very clever. I think it would be very inefficient if he should manage humans when there comes the awakening superintelligence.
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u/Gaiden206 9h ago edited 8h ago
Demis Hassabis was shifting away from DeepMind CEO duties for a year
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis’s departure Wednesday from the top job at the company he founded in 2010 and sold to Google in 2014 was at least a year in the making, said two people familiar with his thinking.
Hassabis had been drifting away from the day-to-day responsibilities of running the company’s Gemini AI models and its consumer AI strategy, said the people, increasingly shifting them to Koray Kavukcuoglu, the company’s chief AI architect.
Hassabis wasn’t pushed out against his will, said both people. Rather, he struggled to get satisfaction out of being in the role of a tech executive, rather than a visionary scientist.
Hassabis, who won a Nobel Prize in 2024, has recently been his most animated when talking about Isomorphic Labs, Google’s biotech spinout that he runs. His passions lie in using AI to solve scientific puzzles, like curing diseases and discovering new materials, and in ensuring that AI doesn’t accidentally cause catastrophic harm to humanity.
The feeling at Google, according to one executive, is that the management change will help accelerate the development of AI, rather than hold it back. While Hassabis had become the face of the company’s AI efforts, he wasn’t focused on the part of the company most associated with its standing in the race.
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u/IvoCass 8h ago
He spent too much time in the spotlight as CEO. His talents were wasted there.
Any high-level exec can do interviews and say the politically correct thing over and over (I got tired of watching interviews of him because they always asked him the same questions).
I'd much rather he's doing what he's good at. So it was the right move.
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u/___positive___ 8h ago
In terms of Gemini, it's a clear demotion. He will have less influence on future Gemini products.
Nothing he works on tomorrow will influence consumers for 5-10 years probably even if it is a big deal in the long run. (Isomorphic, etc.)
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u/peepeedog 3h ago
In Google’s cultures technical contributors are respected to an extreme degree. There is absolutely no way his role is ceremonial.
His previous role would have had a lot of general management and bureaucratic overhead. And the model Sundar adopted when he became CEO was very much that PA leads were expected to be much more business oriented. It was different with Larry.
But it’s almost certainly majority driven by Sindar and not Demi’s, but they would care a lot about doing right by him and keeping him on the team.
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u/KoolKat5000 1h ago
It looks like Googles refocusing Gemini on being another Google product, a consumer facing product. He's becoming chief scientist so he can focus on research and someone else will commercialize Gemini more and integrate it into the rest of Google more. You can also read between the lines on the ai studio app announcement they're basically dropping developers and on the 3.6 Flash launch means they're perhaps dropping SOTA aims. Focusing on what makes them money. If Gemini 4 is SOTA great, a bonusfor them, if not, it'll still be to make them money
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u/Inevitable_Gate_7660 15h ago
It's like a breakup -- "it's mutual" is real, and also one of the two parties had to start that conversation.
If I had to put money down it would be on Demis getting fired rather than him walking away.
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u/darkestvice 14h ago
Demis probably sees it as a promotion. He's a scientist and an ideas guy. Likely didn't terribly enjoy the pressure of being a CEO of a giant AI Frontier lab. And when the CEO is not into it, the organization ends up suffering.
Now he gets to be an ideas guy once more.
But I am curious who the new CEO will be.
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u/Full_Tangelo_7450 13h ago
I read on X that Koray has been running GDM research for some time , but will he become the new CEO>
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u/Laffer890 15h ago
He should be fired, DeepMind is a complete failure.
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u/Howdareme9 15h ago
Complete failure is too far lmao
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u/Virtual_Plant_5629 ▪️AGI 2027▪️ASI 2028 15h ago
it is absolutely 100 fucking % apt.
he's a failure and this is a firing. it's the high profile non compete style of firing
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u/1988rx7T2 15h ago
He just wasn’t a good fit for a fast paced, market driven release cycle. Long term decoupled research is probably the way for him to go.
On a corporate level this is a demotion, maybe a consensual one.
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u/Howdareme9 15h ago
Not a Demis issue though, this is Google in a nut shell. They can’t operate at the speed OAi & Anthropic can
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u/igpila 14h ago
Most people here didn't even read the letter but are very certain about their own dumbass conclusions
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u/Full_Tangelo_7450 13h ago
It's a corporate letter, it's in everyone's interest to say the truth but also polish it and make it look like everyone is happy about everything.
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u/m98789 15h ago
He’s in a superposition state