There is no way a Chief Scientist (essentially IC) role is more important than leading the whole of DeepMind, 6000 people strong, working on the most important product for the future of Alphabet.
replyThis means Demis wanted a change and to work on other things, it's not Google wanting this.
Dean has pretty big symbolic importance inside of Google regardless of what his role title is/was
replyEdit: sibling story in front page links to this which explains better in its lede text than what I just wrote: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/technology/google-researc...