Google’s Jeff Dean — chief scientist for 27 years — leaving during AI leadership overhaul for startup

Google on Wednesday revealed an overhaul of its AI leadership, as its chief scientist for nearly three decades exits – the latest in a string of high-profile departures to plague the tech giant in its struggle to pull ahead in the artificial intelligence race.

Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, will become the company’s chairman and chief scientist, while Google DeepMind’s technology chief, Koray Kavukcuoglu, will lead work on Google’s new Gemini 4 model, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced in a post on X.

Jeff Dean – Google’s current chief scientist and one of the company’s first employees, working there for 27 years – is leaving to start his own AI startup, Discovery Loop, with three other company veterans, according to a company blog post.

Pichai said Dean is leaving the company on good terms, congratulating him for “an incredible 27-year run.” Google’s owner, Alphabet, will invest in Discovery Loop and provide the startup with cloud and computing capacity, Pichai added.

It’s just the latest exit from Google’s tech leadership as the Silicon Valley giant attempts to convince investors that its massive investments in AI will pay off – especially as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude models remain firmly in the lead for the top chatbots.

Noam Shazeer, a longtime Google computer scientist and leading AI researcher, recently left the company for rival OpenAI, while John Jumper, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on an AlphaFold AI model, jumped ship to Anthropic.

Meanwhile, Google reported that it turned cash flow negative for the first time in the most recent quarter while forecasting full-year capex of as much as $205 billion – even as it failed to share an update on the release of its newest Gemini 3.5 Pro model.

Shares of Alphabet fell 4.2% Wednesday as investors fear the legacy tech company is losing steam in the AI race.

“We are committed to being at the frontier, and are super focused on the areas where we need to improve,” Pichai said in Wednesday’s blog post. “I’m really excited for our upcoming model releases and the progress we’re seeing. We have to continue to move fast and with clear purpose here.”

Along with moving into the chairman role, Hassabis will continue running Isomorphic Labs, a London-based AI drug discovery startup that was spun off from Google.

Hassabis is the co-founder of DeepMind, the AI research lab that Google purchased in 2014. He has been leading Alphabet’s AI divisions over the past few years.

Dean’s new startup, Discovery Loop, aims to automate scientific discovery, arguing the current manual process is slow and labor-intensive and can be made more efficient with the use of AI.

Longtime Google workers Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat – some of the world’s top scientific researchers – are joining Dean to run the new venture.

Its goal is to scale this discovery automation to help advance efforts in drug discovery and world challenges like clean energy.

Along with an investment from Google, Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co-leading a seed round for the new company.

Alphabet has a multi-year partnership with News Corp, which owns The Post, to develop AI-related content and products.