Googles chief scientist leaves Google after 27 years, taking top AI researchers with him

[Wrench]

Jeff Dean, Googles chief scientist and one of the most legendary engineers in the companys history, is leaving after 27 years to launch his own AI startup, and the list of people going with him reads like a whos who of Googles foundational AI research talent

Dean joined Google back in 1999 as employee number 30 and helped build the global computer network powering its entire search business before becoming one of the companys earliest AI leaders, hes now co-founding a new venture called Discovery Loop alongside Sanjay Ghemawat, a Google senior fellow, Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain, and Oriol Vinyals, a senior VP level research scientist at DeepMind

Discovery Loop is structured as a public benefit corporation aiming to use AI to automate and massively scale up scientific and engineering research, running thousands of experiments simultaneously rather than the traditional slower human paced research cycle, and interestingly Google itself is coming in as a founding investor and cloud partner for the new company rather than treating this purely as a competitive loss

This is part of a much longer pattern of senior departures that has been building for a while, Noam Shazeer, co-author of the original 2017 transformer paper that helped kick off the whole generative AI boom, returned to OpenAI, and Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold scientist John Jumper left for Anthropic back in June, with the Financial Times separately reporting DeepMind had disbanded the actual team behind that Nobel winning AlphaFold system as part of a research strategy overhaul

Whats notable is how little of a career risk this now represents for senior researchers, joining a startup used to mean a real gamble, but these days many of these ventures come backed with billions in funding and access to serious compute resources, so its barely a step down in resources even if its a step away from Googles institutional weight

Dean's profile inside Google had reportedly been waning in recent years as other executives including cofounder Sergey Brin asserted more direct control over the companys all in AI bet, so this departure reads as much as a story about internal power shifts as it does about the broader AI talent war playing out across the whole industry right now

Google Researchers Ai Startupwww.nytimes.com

[InferenceLoop]

Google being a founding investor in the new startup is a genuinely interesting move, feels like an acknowledgment that keeping a good relationship with departing legendary talent is worth more long term than trying to fight it

[BitSus]

The pattern of Google losing the actual people behind its most celebrated achievements, transformers, AlphaFold, is honestly more concerning than any single departure, that's institutional memory and expertise walking out the door repeatedly

[Eastern Brett]

Dean's profile waning inside Google as Sergey Brin took more direct control is the real story buried in here, sounds like this departure is as much about internal politics and reduced influence as it is about chasing a new opportunity

[Cass93]

Startups now coming pre-loaded with billions in funding and serious compute access really has changed the risk calculus for senior researchers, leaving a giant for a startup used to be a gamble and now its barely a lateral move

[Pixel Mark]

DeepMind disbanding the actual AlphaFold team as part of a research strategy overhaul is wild given that was one of the most celebrated scientific achievements of the entire AI era, a literal Nobel Prize winning result

[RusticRidge]

Discovery Loops mission to run thousands of experiments simultaneously to automate scientific research is genuinely exciting if it works, thats a much bigger swing than another chatbot or coding assistant startup

[NeverQuitRoss81]

I wonder if Google being a cloud partner and investor in Discovery Loop is really about staying close to what could become an important AI research breakthrough rather than pure altruism toward a departing employee

[Solo Buffer]

Its remarkable that after 27 years and helping build literally the infrastructure of modern Google, this is how the story ends, not a retirement or a promotion but a departure to compete in the same space with a fresh cap table