{"id":131392,"date":"2026-08-06T10:00:19","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T10:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/131392\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T10:00:19","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T10:00:19","slug":"google-ai-earthquake-jeff-dean-leaves-to-start-a-business-takes-the-most-luxurious-technical-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/131392\/","title":{"rendered":"Google AI Earthquake! Jeff Dean Leaves to Start a Business, Takes the ‘Most Luxurious’ Technical Team"},"content":{"rendered":"

Author: \u91cf\u5b50\u4f4d<\/a><\/p>\n

OMG Google, you scared me:<\/p>\n

Just now, Jeff Dean announced he is leaving to start a company.<\/p>\n

\"\u56fe\u7247\"\/<\/p>\n

No need to rub your eyes \u2014 it’s him, the Google legend, Chief Scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research, head of Gemini, and one of only two Senior Google Fellows (level L11) at Google, Jeff Dean.<\/p>\n

The other L11 is Sanjay Ghemawat, one of the startup partners Jeff just announced…<\/p>\n

\"\u56fe\u7247\"\/
\n\u25b3 Centre stage: the two L11 heavyweights<\/p>\n

The other two in the photo are no strangers either: Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals, both the kind of luminaries academic newcomers can pin up and revere.<\/p>\n

And that’s not all. At the same time, it was announced that Google DeepMind CEO Hassabis has stepped down from his previous role, transitioning to Chairman of DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Google parent Alphabet, where he will focus on long-term AGI strategy and accelerating scientific breakthroughs.<\/p>\n

\"\u56fe\u7247\"\/<\/p>\n

Hassabis’s former responsibilities will be taken over by his long-time deputy Koray Kavukcuoglu, who has been promoted to Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai himself.<\/p>\n

Upon the news, Google’s stock price fell 4%, instantly evaporating $186 billion, equivalent to approximately RMB 1.34 trillion.<\/p>\n

\"\u56fe\u7247\"\/<\/p>\n

A Google Legend Leaves to Start a Company<\/p>\n

Jeff Dean’s startup is called Discovery Loop, positioned as a public benefit company, with a mission to automate machine learning, science, and engineering.<\/p>\n

The founding members are all Google AI veterans:<\/p>\n

Jeff Dean: Co-founder of Google Brain, Google Chief Scientist, head of Gemini;
\nSanjay Ghemawat: Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, long-time partner of Jeff Dean, jointly involved in Google File System, MapReduce, Bigtable, and other infrastructure;
\nQuoc Le: Co-founder of Google Brain, co-author of seminal works such as seq2seq and chain-of-thought;
\nOriol Vinyals: Vice President of Research at Google DeepMind and head of deep learning, co-lead of Gemini, involved in projects like seq2seq, AlphaStar, AlphaCode, AlphaFold.<\/p>\n

\"\u56fe\u7247\"\/<\/p>\n

One could say that these few people cover almost the two most important technological threads at Google over the past 20+ years: large-scale computing infrastructure and modern AI.<\/p>\n

However, the departure of such a heavyweight quartet hasn’t burned bridges with Google. On the contrary, Google CEO Sundar Pichai immediately offered his congratulations, revealing that Google has already invested in the new company and will become its cloud partner.<\/p>\n

\"\u56fe\u7247\"\/<\/p>\n

Yet this grace may not be without bitterness \u2014<\/p>\n

Wired revealed that after Jeff Dean and the others expressed their intention to leave, Pichai tried hard to persuade them to stay and keep their Google badges. But in the end, the quartet felt that the joy and freedom of founding a startup were more important.<\/p>\n

Wired quoted Vinyals himself as saying:<\/p>\n

In a big company, to make any fundamental change, you always have to overcome a lot of inertia.<\/p>\n

We want to build something different.<\/p>\n

At present, Discovery Loop’s funding amount and valuation have not been disclosed. Still, any one of these four taken alone would be stunning enough, let alone all four together… It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call this the most luxurious startup lineup of the moment.<\/p>\n

Wired also revealed that the new company hasn’t started building a team yet, and hasn’t even rented office space.<\/p>\n

Now that the news is out and everything has surfaced, it’s likely that more Google talent will follow suit, leaving the giant ship that is struggling amid large model delivery and the battle for talent.<\/p>\n

BTW, as of now, all three primary leaders of Gemini \u2014 Jeff Dean, Oriol Vinyals, and Noam Shazeer \u2014 have confirmed their departure from Google.<\/p>\n

Restructuring of Google’s AI Power Structure<\/p>\n

On the other front, Hassabis’s new move indicates that Google has also begun restructuring its AI power structure internally.<\/p>\n

Hassabis will no longer be responsible for the day-to-day operations of Google DeepMind, but has been promoted to Chairman and Alphabet Chief Scientist, focusing primarily on long-term AGI strategy, societal impact, scientific research, and Isomorphic Labs \u2014 the drug discovery company previously spun out of DeepMind.<\/p>\n

Google also stated that Hassabis will discuss global, strategic AGI issues directly with Google CEO Pichai. This appears to broaden his scope of topics, but reduces his direct executive responsibilities.<\/p>\n

According to Reuters, after the transition, Hassabis will not have many direct reports.<\/p>\n

Hassabis’s former work will be handed over to his deputy Koray Kavukcuoglu, including Gemini model\/application R&D and frontier AI research, among other things. And Kavukcuoglu will report directly to Pichai.<\/p>\n

This seems to mean that the unified command from research to product will further consolidate under the Google CEO himself.<\/p>\n

\"\u56fe\u7247\"\/<\/p>\n

\u25b3 Koray Kavukcuoglu<\/p>\n

In fact, with the long-delayed release of Google’s new flagship Gemini version, Google has already faced enormous pressure from OpenAI and Anthropic in the foundational model competition.<\/p>\n

The loss of core AI talent is one symptom.<\/p>\n

June 18: Transformer core author Noam Shazeer left for a second time, joining OpenAI.
\nJune 19: Hassabis’s long-time partner and Nobel laureate John Jumper moved to Anthropic.
\nJune 24: Two more core Gemini contributors announced joining Anthropic \u2014 Jonas Adler from AI coding, and Alexander Pritzel from the pretraining team.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

It’s only natural that Google is anxious.<\/p>\n

The issue is, large model competition demands more centralized and faster organizational execution, but next-generation technological breakthroughs often rely on a handful of top researchers having enough autonomy.<\/p>\n

In the past, Google was no stranger to seizing the initiative: Codex head Tibo recently revealed that Google had the corresponding technology as early as a year before ChatGPT’s release.<\/p>\n

But, “Google was too nervous to release it, and DeepMind was prohibited from launching products that could impact Google’s business.”<\/p>\n

There is truly nothing new under the sun, but it’s surprising to see Google itself face such an “innovator’s dilemma” day.<\/p>\n

Now, the legendary Jeff Dean has also left, not to retire, not to bow out after achieving success, but departing amid a round of turmoil that hasn’t even ended.<\/p>\n

Greater storms are likely just beginning at the more grassroots levels…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Author: \u91cf\u5b50\u4f4d OMG Google, you scared me: Just now, Jeff Dean announced he is leaving to start a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131393,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[24,1673,8263,3278,65637,8390,3277,7963,25864,4637,132,1429,65640,65639,65636,6904,65638,65635],"class_list":["post-131392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-google","tag-ai","tag-article","tag-bitcoin","tag-blockchain","tag-crypto-article","tag-crypto-news","tag-cryptocurrency","tag-defi","tag-digital-assets","tag-ethereum","tag-google","tag-google-ai","tag-nft","tag-panews","tag-panews-article","tag-web3","tag-web3-news","tag-65635"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131392\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}