The next chapter of our AI momentum

A joint staff memo from Sundar Pichai and Demis Hassabis, published on blog.google on 5 Aug 2026. Hassabis becomes Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. Koray Kavukcuoglu becomes SVP of Google DeepMind, reporting to Pichai and overseeing Gemini models, frontier research and the Gemini app. Jeff Dean leaves after 27 years to start an independent public benefit corporation with Sanjay Ghemawat, with Google as a founding investor. Pichai also noted the Gemini app had reached 950M+ monthly users. Checked via WebFetch; the page shows no explicit date, so the date comes from the tweets and press coverage.

"We have arrived at a pivotal moment in human history. I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now … I feel it is close at hand." (Hassabis)