Alphabet shares fell to a session low, down 5.4%, following reports of a major executive shakeup and high-profile talent departures at the tech giant.
According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Jeff Dean—one of Google’s earliest employees and a chief architect of its artificial intelligence strategy for the past 15 years—is leaving the company to launch an AI startup focused on scientific discovery. Joining Dean as co-founders are fellow Google AI veterans Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, and Sanjay Ghemawat. The new venture, a public-benefit corporation named Discovery Loop, aims to accelerate technological breakthroughs by fully automating complex, multistep science and engineering experiments.
The startup will initially build an internal technology stack to automate machine learning research before expanding into hardware design, drug discovery, and clean energy. Alphabet is backing the venture as a founding investor and cloud computing partner alongside seed round co-leads Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures.
Dean, who joined Google as its 30th employee in 1999 and co-founded Google Brain in 2011, noted that he began planning the startup five weeks ago to build a specialized infrastructure outside of Google’s traditional ecosystem. “We wanted to build something differently than how things are built at Google right now,” Ghemawat explained, noting that Google’s existing framework is tailored for massive consumer apps, search, and ad systems rather than specialized research infrastructure.
The departures add to a series of high-profile AI talent losses for Google, following the recent exits of Character.AI co-founder Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and Nobel laureate John Jumper to Anthropic.
In tandem with Dean’s departure, Google announced a broader restructuring of its artificial intelligence leadership in an official company blog post. Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Google DeepMind lead Demis Hassabis outlined several strategic leadership transitions aimed at sharpening the company’s focus on the AGI frontier and frontier model development.
Under the new structure, Hassabis will transition out of his day-to-day operational responsibilities at Google DeepMind to become Chair of GDM and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, GDM’s Chief Technology Officer and Chief AI Architect, has been promoted to Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai. Kavukcuoglu, a 13-year DeepMind veteran who led early breakthroughs such as WaveNet and DQN, will now oversee Gemini model development, frontier research, and developer teams.
