Google DeepMind is undergoing a major restructuring, underscoring how Alphabet is separating long-horizon AI research from the day-to-day work of shipping products. The company said Wednesday that Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is giving up the title to become chairman of the unit and chief scientist of Alphabet, formalizing a shift toward AGI (artificial general intelligence) strategy and the scientific applications of AI.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s chief technology officer and Alphabet’s chief AI architect, is taking over daily operations as senior vice president of Google DeepMind. He will report to CEO Sundar Pichai rather than holding a stand-alone CEO title, and he will oversee Gemini model development going forward.

Hassabis, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his AlphaFold work, wrote to staff that he believes AGI is close at hand and that getting the next steps right is critical for humanity. He also said he will spend more time at Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet’s AI drug discovery unit, which he has described as the top application of AI for improving human health.

In his note, Hassabis highlighted the “great progress” the company was making with new models, citing the unreleased Gemini 4 by name. Alphabet shares fell around 5% on the news.

The reshuffle comes alongside another departure: Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist and a 27-year veteran at the company, is leaving to cofound Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on automating machine learning, science, and engineering research. He is joined by former Googlers Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. Alphabet is a founding investor in the new company and will provide cloud compute. In an interview with the New York Times, Dean said that operating outside a public company gives the team room to make decisions that are not necessarily in the company’s purest financial interests.

In a note to staff, Pichai wrote: “After an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering.”

The timing comes during a difficult stretch for Google, where leadership turnover is landing as competition in frontier AI remains intense and execution on new models is under close scrutiny. Gemini 3.5 Pro, the next flagship model, is months behind its original June launch target. The company has also seen a string of exits from Gemini’s leadership and research ranks, including the loss of Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and Nobel laureate John Jumper to Anthropic.

In his note to staff, Pichai said Google has the talent, compute, and distribution to compete.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com