Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist and one of its earliest employees, has left after nearly 27 years to launch an AI startup with three colleagues.
Dean joined Google in 1999 as roughly its 30th employee. In a farewell message posted Wednesday, he recalled watching the company grow from about 25 workers to more than 190,000 employees.
“It has been an absolute pleasure to work with you and to help build some of the most widely used and impactful products of all time,” Dean wrote in an excerpt from his email to colleagues.
Discovery Loop Targets Scientific Research
Dean will lead Discovery Loop alongside Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le. All four founders held senior engineering or AI roles at Google.
The Palo Alto startup will use AI to automate scientific and engineering experiments. Its systems aim to propose experiments, run them, analyse results and repeat the process at scale.
The founders plan to test the approach first on machine learning. They later hope to apply it to chip design, biology, drug discovery and materials research.
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Discovery Loop has launched as a public benefit corporation. Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures co-led its funding, while Alphabet also invested.
Google will provide cloud computing capacity during the startup’s first year. Both companies also plan to collaborate on machine learning systems.
Dean helped create major parts of Google’s search and distributed computing systems with Ghemawat. His work also covered Google Brain, TensorFlow and Gemini.
Google Reshuffles AI Leadership
Dean’s departure formed part of a wider overhaul at Google’s AI division. Demis Hassabis will leave daily management of Google DeepMind and become its chairman and Alphabet’s chief scientist.
Hassabis said the role would let him focus on artificial general intelligence, research and AI’s impact on society. He will also spend more time at Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug discovery company he leads.
DeepMind technology chief Koray Kavukcuoglu will assume day-to-day responsibility. He will serve as senior vice president and continue as Alphabet’s chief AI architect.
Kavukcuoglu will oversee Google’s frontier models and products, including Gemini. The changes come as Google faces competition from OpenAI, Anthropic and open-source developers.
Departure Marks End of an Era
Dean co-founded Google Brain in 2011. He became Google’s chief scientist when the company merged Brain with DeepMind in 2023.
His exit follows other senior departures. Reuters reported that Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI in June, while Nobel laureate John Jumper joined Anthropic.
Alphabet shares fell about 4 percent after the changes became public. Investors are watching Google as it raises AI spending and prepares new Gemini releases.
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai praised Dean and Ghemawat for driving changes from early search infrastructure to modern neural networks. Google’s investment in Discovery Loop also shows that the relationship remains cooperative.
Dean now faces the challenge of turning an ambitious research idea into a working platform.
