Google's Gemini AI hits 1 billion users as DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis steps down

Aug 12, 2026

Google's Gemini AI assistant has surpassed 1 billion monthly users in record time, marking a major milestone as the company undergoes a massive leadership shakeup. Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind to become chairman, with Koray Kavukcuoglu taking over day-to-day operations. Simultaneously, Google's chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving after 27 years to launch Discovery Loop, a Google-backed startup. These changes come as Google faces intense pressure from co-founder Sergey Brin to close the AI performance gap with OpenAI and Anthropic, amid delays to its flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro model.

DeepMind leadership transition

▪Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind to become the unit's chairman and Alphabet's chief scientist.
▪Koray Kavukcuoglu relocated from London to Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, consolidating AI leadership out of London.
▪Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously DeepMind's chief technology officer, is promoted to senior vice president and takes charge of Gemini model development.

Google AI competitive lag

▪Google co-founder Sergey Brin has been informally pressing DeepMind staff to move faster and close the performance gap with rivals.
▪Google has lagged behind OpenAI and Anthropic in coding models and agentic tooling, which are the primary categories enterprises pay for.
▪Google's AI division overhaul on August 5, 2026, followed structural issues including constrained computing capacity and disagreements between project leads.

Gemini 3.5 Pro delays

▪Gemini 3.5 Pro missed three release deadlines after being unveiled at Google I/O in May 2026 with a promise to ship the following month.
▪Google delayed the release of its flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro model to improve performance in areas like computer coding.

Gemini billion user milestone

▪Google's Gemini AI assistant has surpassed 1 billion monthly users, making it the company's fastest-growing product ever.
▪Google's AI crawlers have the same access as its search engine crawlers, allowing Google to access over 300 percent more of the web than OpenAI.
▪Gemini reached the 1 billion user milestone faster than OpenAI's ChatGPT, having launched four months after ChatGPT under the Bard brand.

Jeff Dean Discovery Loop

▪Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals left Google alongside Jeff Dean to join Discovery Loop.
▪Google is backing Discovery Loop as a founding investor and cloud partner, with Jeff Dean set to serve as the startup's CEO.
▪Jeff Dean is leaving Google after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop, an independent public benefit corporation focused on AI-automated scientific research.