Alphabet's stock fell sharply intraday, touching a session low down 5.4% after news emerged that Jeff Dean, one of Google's earliest employees and a central figure in the company's artificial intelligence strategy for the last 15 years, is departing to start a new AI venture.
The new company, Discovery Loop, will be structured as a public-benefit corporation and is being formed with several other Google AI veterans as co-founders: Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, and Sanjay Ghemawat. According to the report, the group intends to build a technology stack that can fully automate multistep, complex science and engineering experiments - a scope that the founders expect to begin within machine learning research and later extend into hardware design, drug discovery, and clean energy.
Alphabet is listed as a founding investor and will serve as a cloud computing partner for Discovery Loop, alongside seed round co-leads Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures. The arrangement preserves a research and cloud partnership between Alphabet and the new venture.
Dean, who joined Google as its 30th employee in 1999 and co-founded Google Brain in 2011, told colleagues he began planning the startup five weeks ago to develop a specialized infrastructure separate from Google’s existing ecosystem. Ghemawat described the motivation for creating an independent platform, saying, "We wanted to build something differently than how things are built at Google right now," and noting that Google's current systems are optimized for massive consumer applications such as search and ads rather than for niche research infrastructure.
The departures deepen a string of recent AI talent exits from Google, which earlier saw Character.AI co-founder Noam Shazeer leave for OpenAI and Nobel laureate John Jumper join Anthropic. These moves, alongside Dean's departure, factor into broader questions about talent flows in the AI sector.
In parallel with the announcement of Dean's exit, Google and Alphabet disclosed a strategic reorganization of AI leadership. Sundar Pichai, Google and Alphabet's CEO, together with Google DeepMind lead Demis Hassabis, set out several leadership changes intended to sharpen the company's focus on artificial general intelligence and frontier model work.
Under the new arrangement, Hassabis will step away from day-to-day operational responsibilities at Google DeepMind and assume the roles of Chair of GDM and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, who has served as DeepMind's Chief Technology Officer and Chief AI Architect, was promoted to Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind and will report directly to Pichai.
Kavukcuoglu, a 13-year DeepMind veteran credited with leading early technical breakthroughs such as WaveNet and DQN, will now be responsible for overseeing development of the Gemini models, frontier research efforts, and related developer teams.
In a company statement addressing the changes, Pichai praised Dean and Ghemawat for their contributions over a 27-year span - including work on early search infrastructure, Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), and advances in deep-learning neural networks - and confirmed that Alphabet plans to continue its research and cloud collaboration with Discovery Loop.
The combination of a high-profile founder departure, fresh venture funding with Alphabet involvement, and a sizable internal leadership shuffle underscores an active period for AI initiatives tied to the company. The moves touch a range of activities from core research and cloud services to future application areas like hardware, pharmaceuticals, and clean-energy research that the new startup intends to pursue.