JEFF DEAN LEAVES GOOGLE TO START AI RESEARCH COMPANY

Jeff Dean, chief scientist of Google DeepMind, is leaving Alphabet after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop, an AI-focused public benefit corporation backed by Alphabet, Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures as founding investors. Dean is departing alongside fellow senior researchers Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le. The four have contributed to development of Google Search, Ads, Translate, Tensor Processing Units, AlphaFold and Gemini AI, and are among the most-cited AI researchers globally. Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed the departures and Alphabet's role as founding investor.

Discovery Loop intends to automate machine learning research and engineering processes, beginning with internal systems before expanding to other scientific domains. The company's stated goal is to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery across fields including drug development and environmental crisis response. The founding team's website states that historical scientific progress has relied on sequential human iterations, a process the company characterises as slow and labour-intensive in many domains. Alphabet stock fell more than 4 per cent at market close on 5 August following the announcement.

Separately, Demis Hassabis, leader of Google DeepMind, will transition to become chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist at Alphabet, whilst continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs, the company's drug development division. Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind's chief technology officer, will assume the role of senior vice-president of Google DeepMind and will report to Pichai, whilst retaining his position as Google's chief AI architect. Pichai indicated the leadership changes reflect the company's strategic priorities in AI development and advancement.