Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals are leaving to form a new AI company. Demis Hassabis is handing daily control of Google DeepMind to one of his longest-serving deputies.
Four engineers whose work runs through Google Search, the company’s computing infrastructure and Gemini are leaving to start a new AI venture.
At the same time, DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis is giving up day-to-day control of Google’s main AI organization. He will become chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet, with longtime deputy Koray Kavukcuoglu taking operational control.
Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat helped build the infrastructure that supported Google’s early search engine. Dean later helped establish Google Brain, the research unit that developed many of the techniques and systems behind Google’s modern AI products.
They are leaving with Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals to form Discovery Loop, a public benefit company focused on using AI to automate scientific and engineering research.
The founders’ combined record includes work on multiple generations of Google Search, Google Ads, Google Translate, TensorFlow, TPUs, Gemini and several foundational machine-learning techniques, according to Discovery Loop.
Those connections explain why the departures matter more than the names may initially suggest: Google is losing people who helped build both its original search infrastructure and the AI stack now transforming that search engine.
Google is still backing their next company
Google will become a founding investor in Discovery Loop and provide computing capacity through Google Cloud. The companies also plan to collaborate on machine-learning systems and related infrastructure research.
That relationship gives Google continued access to the group’s work, but it also gives four senior researchers the independence and potential equity upside of building outside Alphabet.
DeepMind’s founder is moving out of daily management
Hassabis, meanwhile, is staying inside Alphabet but moving away from operating Google DeepMind.
Google created the unit in 2023 by combining Hassabis’ DeepMind with Google Brain. Hassabis became CEO, while Dean became Google’s chief scientist and helped direct the combined organization’s research.
Under the new structure, Hassabis will focus on long-term artificial general intelligence strategy, scientific research and Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet’s AI drug-discovery company.
Kavukcuoglu will become senior vice president of Google DeepMind and report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. His responsibilities include Gemini model development, frontier AI research, the Gemini app and Google’s AI developer teams.
In practical terms, Kavukcuoglu is now the executive responsible for turning Google’s AI research into models and products.
What this means for Google Search
Google announced no immediate change to Search’s management, ranking systems, AI Overviews or AI Mode.
But Google DeepMind supplies the Gemini models underlying many of those experiences. Hassabis described the organization as Google’s “AI engine room,” specifically connecting its work to AI Mode and AI Overviews.
The first meaningful test of the new structure will therefore be execution: whether Kavukcuoglu can deliver Google’s next Gemini models and translate them into better consumer and search products.
