Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist, the engineer who helped build TensorFlow, TPUs and the infrastructure that made Google's AI possible, announced Wednesday that he is leaving after 27 years to co-found a new AI company called Discovery Loop alongside Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat and researchers Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le.
His last day was August 6. Google said the split is amicable and that it will invest in the startup and serve as its cloud partner.
The departure came packaged with a second bombshell: Demis Hassabis, the Nobel Prize-winning co-founder of DeepMind and CEO of Google DeepMind since the company's 2014 acquisition, is stepping back from day-to-day operational leadership and moving into a chairman role at Google DeepMind while assuming the title of Alphabet chief scientist.
DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu becomes SVP of Google DeepMind and takes over operations and Gemini, reporting directly to Sundar Pichai.
Alphabet stock fell approximately 4 percent on the announcement. The moves come as Google has been bleeding AI research talent to OpenAI, Anthropic, startups and now Dean's own venture, a pattern that has raised persistent questions about whether the company that pioneered modern deep learning can stay at the frontier it helped create.
Dean's farewell email, subject line "Thank you and farewell," noted he had watched Google grow from 25 people to more than 190,000 and touched 13 products each used by over a billion people.