[AINews] Jeff, Sanjay, Oriol, and Quoc depart DeepMind; Demis to Chair; Koray to SVP — what is going on at GDM???
Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le leave DeepMind to cofound autoresearch startup Discovery Loop.
Four of the most consequential researchers in AI history — Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le — are departing Google DeepMind to cofound Discovery Loop, an autoresearch startup backed by Google. Simultaneously, Demis Hassabis steps down as CEO to become Chair and Chief Scientist, with CTO Koray ascending to SVP of GDM. The coordinated exodus of this much senior talent signals deep structural tension at GDM around research autonomy and scale, echoing earlier departures like John Jumper to Anthropic.