Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving the company after 27 years and is founding his own AI research start-up called Discovery Loop with long-time Google Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat. The company is registered as a Public-Benefit Corporation and aims to accelerate scientific discoveries through automated, massively parallel AI experiments. At the same time, Demis Hassabis is stepping down from the operational leadership of Google DeepMind, while Alphabet’s stock temporarily lost over four percent following the announcement.
Discovery Loop automates scientific experiments
Dean joined Google in 1999 as the thirtieth employee and most recently shaped key AI projects of the company as chief scientist. In a blog post, Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed the move: Dean is at a point after 27 “incredible” years where he wants to try something new, and the company supports him in that. Dean himself also announced the founding on X.
In addition to Ghemawat, who is one of the longest-serving Google engineers as a Senior Fellow, according to TechCrunch, Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le and DeepMind researcher Oriol Vinyals are also joining Discovery Loop. The new company aims to accelerate discoveries in machine learning, science, and technology. Algorithms are expected to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments simultaneously, thus automating part of the research work. Dean explained that this would lead to both more and qualitatively better experiments, resulting in scientific breakthroughs.
The start is financed by a seed round led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital are also participating. Google itself remains a founding investor and cloud partner of the young company – none of the parties disclosed a valuation. This move is part of a series of spin-offs by experienced AI researchers: in July, reinforcement learning pioneer Richard Sutton founded Oak Lab, a lab for continuously learning agents.
Hassabis hands over operational leadership of DeepMind
Demis Hassabis, who has led Google DeepMind since its merger with Google Brain, is stepping down from his operational role. According to Pichai’s blog post, he will become Chairman of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while also remaining head of Isomorphic Labs, the company’s AI drug research subsidiary. Going forward, he will work from the new London Platform-37 offices. Hassabis explained the change by saying he now needs time and space to focus on the “big picture” instead of day-to-day operations.
The DeepMind chief had publicly floated a proposal for an independent AI oversight body in July. In his new role as Alphabet’s chief scientist, he is likely to coordinate such policy questions more closely with CEO Pichai. Operational leadership of Google DeepMind passes to Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously the unit’s chief technology officer. He will report directly to Pichai and oversee development of the Gemini models, frontier AI research, as well as the Gemini app and developer teams.
According to Pichai, Kavukcuoglu has worked for the unit for thirteen years, since its early days. With him, a pure technology manager takes the operational lead of Google DeepMind for the first time, while Hassabis focuses on strategic and scientific questions.
Change follows record numbers at Gemini and Gemma
The leadership change comes as Google expands its AI reach: the Gemini app now has more than 950 million monthly users, according to the company’s own, independently unverified figures. The openly available Gemma models have been downloaded over 900 million times, Pichai said. Google places these numbers deliberately in the same post – a sign that the company wants to frame the restructuring as a move from a position of perceived strength.
On the stock market, the news still caused movement: Alphabet’s stock lost more than four percent during trading, according to SiliconANGLE. Google had consolidated its AI divisions under the Google DeepMind brand in 2023 to catch up in the race with OpenAI and Anthropic. The current reshuffle is the largest leadership change at the top of this unit to date.
What matters now is whether Discovery Loop attracts more experienced Google researchers and reinforces the trend toward independent AI research labs, even as the company reorders its own AI leadership. It remains open how quickly the new company will produce concrete research results, and whether the investment pays off for Google as a founding investor.
