SAN FRANCISCO: Google's head of AI, Demis Hassabis, will step down from his current role to become Alphabet's chief scientist amid a reshuffling at DeepMind that will also include a key engineer's departure. Hassabis will take on two new titles, Alphabet announced on Wednesday: chair of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010, and four years later, Google bought the research lab for $650 million, according to reports at the time. Google is competing for customers alongside other major AI developers including Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, as well as DeepSeek and Moonshot in China. "I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand," Hassabis wrote in Wednesday's blog post.