Google DeepMind loses Hassabis and Dean at once
Demis Hassabis is stepping back from running Google DeepMind to become Alphabet's chief scientist, while Jeff Dean exits after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop — an AI-for-science startup backed by Radical and Khosla, with Gemini co-lead Oriol Vinyals and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le joining him. CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu takes day-to-day control of Gemini and frontier research, reporting to Sundar Pichai. The exits stack onto Noam Shazeer's move to OpenAI in June and David Silver's departure in February, pulling decades of AI depth out of Google as it bets on Gemini 4 to close a coding gap against OpenAI and Anthropic.
Source: the-decoder.com ↗
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Why this matters
- → Google loses four foundational AI researchers to departures and startups
- → Deepens talent drain as OpenAI and Anthropic poach key Gemini architects
- → Signals internal friction as Dean's X post omits thanks after 27 years