Several Leading AI Developers Leave Google to Found New Startup

In a significant leadership shakeup at Google DeepMind, CEO Demis Hassabis revealed he will step back from day-to-day management to concentrate on strategic goals at Alphabet, including advancing artificial general intelligence (AGI). He will retain oversight of Isomorphic Labs, an Alphabet subsidiary applying AI to biomedical challenges. Koray Kavukcuoglu will take over as senior vice president of DeepMind, reporting directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, while Hassabis becomes chairman of DeepMind and chief scientist at Alphabet. Concurrently, several renowned AI researchers—Quoc Le, Oriol Vinyals, Jeff Dean, and Sanjay Ghemawat—have decided to leave Google to found Discovery Loop, a startup aimed at automating scientific discoveries using AI, with funding largely enabled by the founders' reputations. The departures are particularly notable for Dean and Ghemawat, who were instrumental in Google's early technologies, and Dean is famously celebrated in the unofficial 'Jeff Dean Facts' collection on GitHub.