The Demis firewall - by Alex Heath - Sources

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The Demis firewall<br>Why the Google DeepMind shakeup matters less than it looks, except for one change. Also: My chat with Figma's CEO, OpenAI's Hugging Face postmortem, and more.

Alex Heath<br>Aug 06, 2026<br>∙ Paid

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Inside Google DeepMind, today’s executive shakeup landed with more or less a shrug. Demis Hassabis handing day-to-day control of the lab to Koray Kavukcuoglu was closer to a formality than a bombshell, people there tell me, and while Jeff Dean’s exit stings, it’s being processed internally as more of a spiritual departure than a strategic one.<br>That’s not how the outside world took it. Alphabet shed 4 percent on the news that Demis is moving up to GDM chairman and Alphabet chief scientist, that Koray is stepping up as an SVP reporting to Sundar Pichai , and that Jeff is leaving after 27 years, along with Sanjay Ghemawat , Oriol Vinyals , and Quoc Le , to start Discovery Loop, a public-benefit corporation that wants to automate scientific discovery itself. The take writes itself: Google is losing the pillars of its AI efforts at the worst possible moment.<br>People I’ve talked to inside Google say Koray has been the main guy on the models for at least a year (Demis’s his own memo to employees essentially says this: “the Gemini models are in good hands with Koray and the leads, as they have been for a while”), and Demis has become increasingly less interested in shipping chatbot features and refereeing Google’s endless internal compute allocation fights.<br>Where his head has been instead:

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