London-based Sir Demis Hassabis is a well-known AI researcher who cofounded DeepMind in 2010 before selling it to Google for $500 million four years later|John Sears|CC BY-SA 4.0

As it races for dominance in AI, Google is seeing top-level executive changes. Its DeepMind founder and CEO, Sir Demis Hassabis, stepped down on Wednesday.

He will be the chair of DeepMind and the chief scientist at Alphabet.

London-based Hassabis is a well-known AI researcher who cofounded DeepMind in 2010 before selling it to Google for $500 million four years later.

CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over as senior vice-president of DeepMind.

Meanwhile, the company’s Chief Scientist, Jeff Dean, is stepping away after 27 years to build an AI startup with three colleagues.

The former employer will invest in the company.

The shakeup comes as Google battles OpenAI and Anthropic in a costly AI arms race.

Google stock fell 5% following the announcements.