🚨 BREAKING: Four of Google’s top AI legends are leaving to start a new company & Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping aside

Source: Cecile G. Tamura post:

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BREAKING: Four of Google’s top AI legends are leaving to start a new company.

Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals—the minds behind Google Brain, TensorFlow, and TPUs—have officially launched Discovery Loop.

https://www.discoveryloop.com/

Here is what you need to know:

The Mission: Discovery Loop isn't building everyday productivity tools or chasing traditional AI benchmarks. Structured as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), its focus is redefining how scientific discovery and engineering research are conducted.

Major Backing: Vinod Khosla / Khosla Ventures is leading the charge, explicitly comparing this move to their early 2018 investment in Sam Altman and OpenAI.

Google’s Strategic Role: Rather than a clean split, Google is actively investing in the venture and serving as its official cloud provider.

If successful, the impact won't just be measured in software features—it will be measured in new scientific breakthroughs to improve billions of lives.

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Source: Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping aside

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Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping aside

• Ina Fried,
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Photo illustration: Axios Visuals. Photo: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty Images

Demis Hassabis is leaving his role as CEO of Google DeepMind to be the unit's chairman. Chief scientist Jeff Dean and several Google AI colleagues are leaving to start their own company, which Google will invest in.

Why it matters: Google's AI organization is undergoing a profound change as the company struggles to keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic.

The big picture: The moves are the latest in a series of departures and shifts at Google as frontier AI models have been advancing rapidly in recent months.

Driving the news: Hassabis will add the title of chief scientist for Google parent company Alphabet and also continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, the company's AI drug discovery spinoff.

• Koray Kavukcuoglu, the current chief technology officer of Google DeepMind will serve as senior VP of the unit, reporting to CEO Sundar Pichai.
• Dean, a 27-year Google veteran is starting Discovery Loop, an independent publicity benefit corporation in which Google will be an investor and cloud provider. Joining him in that effort are Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat as well as Oriol Vinyals, a DeepMind VP and Quoc Le, a Google Brain co-founder.

Follow the money: Google's stock fell over 4% on the news.

• The stock had been on a tear, rallying 13% from a post-earnings report low.

What they're saying: Google aimed to put a positive spin on the exits and shifts, with Hassabis, Pichai and Kavukcuoglu all sharing upbeat memos.

Hassabis: "I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand," Hassabis wrote. "It's critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder."

• "With this backdrop, I've decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability"

Pichai: "We've got amazing talent, world-class compute, and products that bring AI to more people than any other company."

• "We have to accelerate all this work and stay focused on the AI frontier. At the same time, there's never been a more important moment to shape the future of AGI and science."

Kavukcuoglu: "For Google DeepMind, our mission to build AI responsibly to benefit humanity does not change. My primary focus is ensuring we have the clearest possible path to delivering on our ambitious Gemini roadmap as we progress toward AGI. In today's rapidly evolving landscape, we must operate with absolute intention and velocity."

Zoom in: The role positions Hassabis to focus more keenly on the scientific aspects of AI development.

• The work Hassabis did on AlphaFold to predict 3D structures of proteins helped him and co-lead John Jumper win a Nobel prize in 2024.

Zoom out: In an interview with The New York Times, Dean indicated that leaving Google, a public company, gives him more leeway to focus on scientific discoveries associated with AI as well.

• "We might make decisions that are not necessarily in the company's purist financial interests," he told NYT.

What we're watching: The change comes after a groundswell of pushback from Google DeepMind employees and several high profile talent exits.

• Google's Gemini 3.5 Pro is months behind, with some company sources telling Axios that's in part due to low morale.
• Several top researchers, including Gemini's co-lead, have left the firm for competing AI labs.

This story has been updated with details throughout.

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On X: https://x.com/Michaelzsguo/status/2085112357823377868

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Jeff Dean has left Google. After working there for 27 years, he decided to start his own company. And the partner standing beside him is none other than his longtime collaborator of many years, Sanjay Ghemawat. This pair of engineers, once known as Google's only two Senior Fellows, have now stepped out of Google together. If you're unfamiliar with their story, this might just seem like yet another piece of news today about an AI talent leaving to launch a startup. But after watching this video, you'll feel that this moment was almost destined to happen. Jeff and Sanjay first met at DEC's research lab, then joined the fledgling Google one after the other in 1999. They have a very special way of pair programming: the two of them sit in front of the same computer, one writes code while the other reads and thinks, then they switch places. No fixed territories, no need to prove who's smarter—the word "ego" barely exists between them. Over the more than two decades that followed, they created a series of foundational systems like Google File System, MapReduce, Bigtable, Spanner, and more. That's how Google grew from a few hundred cheap servers into the infrastructure serving billions of people worldwide. Many of the concepts in today's cloud computing, big data, and distributed systems have evolved along the paths they laid down. The modern internet is the way it is today, in part, thanks to these two quiet code-writers and the decades-long trust between them that never cracked. This video also gathers a wealth of precious early Google footage: offices crammed with CRT monitors, server clusters pieced together from cheap machines, cluttered early data centers, a young Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the original papers and architecture diagrams for systems like Jeff, Sanjay, and MapReduce. Now, Jeff Dean is leaving the Google where he worked for 27 years to start a new company called Discovery Loop, which uses machine learning to accelerate scientific discovery. After all these twists and turns, the person setting off with him is still Sanjay.

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2026-08-09: from Cecile G. Tamura's post:

Sergey Brin stepping into direct oversight of Gemini may be exactly what Google needs right now.

According to reports, Google co-founder Sergey Brin is taking a more direct role in overseeing Gemini as Google restructures its AI leadership.

https://www.ft.com/content/1453e9c2-4922-482f-8720-0bafd7e07df7?utm_source=

https://www.wsj.com/tech/sergey-brin-google-ai-gemini-1b5aa41e?utm_source=

This is more than another org-chart shuffle.

It’s one of the people who helped invent modern search—and build one of the most consequential technology companies in history—putting his full weight behind what may be Google’s most important product of the decade.

And Brin is uniquely suited for this moment.

First: he brings founder-level ownership with genuine technical depth.

Brin isn’t a career executive managing AI from a distance. He co-created PageRank, helped establish Google’s deep-learning efforts, backed the acquisition of DeepMind, and returned to Google specifically to work hands-on with its AI efforts.

Reports have described him sitting alongside the Gemini team, examining training metrics and loss curves, writing code, and pushing researchers and engineers toward greater velocity.

That kind of hands-on involvement from someone who understands both the models and the systems behind them is extremely rare at Google's scale.

Second: he brings long-term ambition without the usual corporate filters.

Brin has openly discussed the race toward AGI, the importance of using AI to accelerate AI research—particularly through coding—and the need to move quickly rather than over-constrain products.

He understands something many organizations struggle to combine:

frontier AI research + real-world technological scale.

Google doesn't just have a model.

It has Search, Android, Chrome, YouTube, Cloud, billions of users, enormous compute infrastructure, and decades of experience deploying technology globally.

If Gemini can connect the frontier research happening inside Google DeepMind with that distribution advantage, the upside is enormous.

Third: Brin has the authority to cut through bureaucracy.

As Google's co-founder, he carries a level of institutional influence that few people inside Alphabet can match. He can help align talent, compute, resources, and priorities around a single objective—and potentially accelerate decision-making when every month matters.

And perhaps most importantly, his return signals something cultural:

Google's AI effort is no longer something to be managed. It is something to be fought for.

The AI race has entered a phase where raw research breakthroughs matter, but so do execution speed, engineering culture, compute allocation, product integration, and the ability to turn frontier capabilities into products used by billions.

Brin understands all of those dimensions.

He helped build the infrastructure of the internet.

He stepped back.

He came back because AI was too important to watch from the sidelines.

And now he appears to be leaning even further into Gemini.

That’s not just a leadership change.

It’s a founder returning to the arena at exactly the moment the stakes could not be higher.

Google has extraordinary AI talent.

Now it may have its founder pushing the organization to move with the urgency of a startup again.

If Brin can help unlock that combination of frontier research, engineering velocity, and Google's unmatched distribution, Gemini could become a very different competitor.

The next chapter of the AI race just got a lot more interesting.