Google chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving the company after 27 years to launch an independent public benefit corporation called Discovery Loop, joined by fellow Google veterans Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals. The high-profile departure triggered a four percent drop in Alphabet shares on Wednesday.
One of the most influential figures in modern artificial intelligence is stepping away from the tech giant he helped build. Jeff Dean, who joined Google in 1999 as its 30th employee and served as chief scientist, is departing alongside longtime collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat to establish a new venture aimed at automating complex scientific experimentation.
Foundational Engineers Pivot to Automated Science
The new startup, named Discovery Loop, is organized as a public benefit corporation. It seeks to use high-octane algorithms to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments simultaneously, targeting a fundamental bottleneck in research and engineering. Dean and Ghemawat bring deep infrastructure expertise to the effort, having co-authored the foundational distributed computing papers—including MapReduce, Bigtable, Spanner, and the Google File System—that made internet-scale computation possible.
They are joined at Discovery Loop by Quoc Le, a key researcher and founding member of Google Brain, and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Le and Vinyals bring model-research expertise that complements the infrastructure background of the co-founders. Vinyals co-authored a 2014 sequence-to-sequence paper that established the encoder-decoder paradigm underlying modern language translation, while Le helped establish the concept of pre-training large AI systems on massive datasets.
“While science and engineering have tremendously advanced society over past centuries, progress has traditionally relied on slow, sequential human iterations, creating a significant bottleneck.”
Discovery Loop founding team, via press release
Venture Backing and High-Level Negotiations
The departure was not frictionless. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai attempted over multiple meetings to convince the engineering leaders to stay, but the team ultimately chose the freedom of an independent startup. In a large organization there is always a lot of inertia you have to overcome to make any radical changes
, Vinyals told Wired regarding the decision to leave.
Despite the exit, Alphabet is maintaining close ties to the venture. Google will participate as a founding investor and serve as a cloud computing partner for the startup. The initial funding round was co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with additional participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital.
“With this team, I wouldn’t need to know what they were doing before I backed them,” says venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who met with them in his Sand Hill Road office on a Saturday, so no one would get a hint of Google’s upcoming loss. “It’s the ultimate superstar team.”
Vinod Khosla, venture capitalist
Sweeping Leadership Reshuffle at Google DeepMind
The high-level departures coincided with a sweeping restructuring of Google’s AI divisions. Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind, is stepping away from day-to-day operational management to assume the role of chairman of Google DeepMind while also becoming chief scientist of parent company Alphabet.
Alphabet shares fell about 4% following the twin announcements of the leadership shake-up and the departure of its veteran engineers. Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind CTO and Google chief AI architect, has been promoted to senior vice president of Google DeepMind, where he will oversee the development of the upcoming Gemini 4 model and report directly to Pichai.
As Google navigates an intensely competitive landscape against rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic, the company is betting that its reshuffled leadership team and custom tensor processing units can maintain momentum while its former chief scientist charts a new course in automated scientific discovery.
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