Together, they will build an independent public benefit corporation focused on using AI to automate scientific and engineering research. Google is backing the venture as a founding investor and cloud partner, and Mr. Dean is reportedly set to serve as its CEO.
Jeff Dean, the company’s chief scientist and its 30th employee, is walking out the door after 27 years to co-found an AI startup called Discovery Loop, taking three senior colleagues with him: Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals.
Google is going through its most consequential leadership churn in AI since the ChatGPT moment forced Sundar Pichai to declare a “code red” three years ago.
What Is New
Alongside that exit comes a bigger internal shuffle. Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind to become the unit’s chairman and Alphabet’s chief scientist , while staying on to run Isomorphic Labs, the company’s drug-discovery spinoff. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s current chief technology officer, moves up to senior vice president and takes charge of Gemini model development. These changes show that Google is losing its most senior technical experts at the exact moment the AI race has stopped rewarding seniority and started rewarding shipping speed.
Features and Changes
Whether that instinct pays off depends entirely on what Discovery Loop actually builds. A company promising to automate scientific and engineering research at scale is a big claim dressed in modest language, and the field it’s entering — AI for science, drug discovery, materials, chip design — is capital-intensive, and slow to show returns.
