Google DeepMind's Hassabis Steps Aside as Jeff Dean Exits After 27 Years

On July 25, Jeff Dean stood before 6,000 would-be founders at Y Combinator's Startup School in San Francisco's Chase Center. Asked what they should build, he described an automated version of the scientific method. “You propose an experiment, you implement what you need to run the experiment, you evaluate the experiment, and then you get results from that,” he said, according to WIRED. Run thousands of such loops, he continued, and the system might find advances in biology or chip design.

The crowd did not know Dean was describing a company he had just organized in secret. He is now leaving Google to run it.

On Aug. 5, Google announced that Demis Hassabis would move from Google DeepMind chief executive to chair of the unit and chief scientist of Alphabet. Koray Kavukcuoglu will take over as senior vice president, reporting to Sundar Pichai. Dean, meanwhile, is leaving with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le to found Discovery Loop.

What Google is losing

Dean, 58, was Google's 30th employee when he joined in 1999. At the Aug. 5 announcement, his Google tenure had reached 27 years, with his exit expected within the next few days. Along with Ghemawat and others, he designed software systems including MapReduce, BigTable and Spanner, which helped Google's search engine handle a global audience and became models for the wider industry. Dean and Ghemawat are the only two Google employees to have held the company's highest technical honor, senior fellow, The New York Times reported.

Discovery Loop wants to automate the experimental work that researchers usually perform by hand. A model would suggest a test, build what it needs to run the test, inspect the result and use what it learned to design the next attempt. The related idea, recursive self-improvement, means applying that process to the AI itself with little or no human help. The founders plan to begin by improving their own machine-learning software, then apply it to scientific and engineering problems.

The mission is not novel. WIRED noted that Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Jensen Huang have each claimed that AI will become an engine of scientific discovery, solving problems humans could not crack alone. Oriol Vinyals, one of Discovery Loop's founders, named a present limit in the prelaunch interview. “One of the things that we'll be obviously very focused on is how these models come up with new ideas to try. That's not something that currently they're super strong at.”

Vinod Khosla met the four founders in his Sand Hill Road office on a Saturday, a choice meant to conceal Google's coming loss. “With this team, I wouldn't need to know what they were doing before I backed them,” he said in WIRED's prelaunch interview. “It's the ultimate superstar team.” Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures invested alongside Alphabet, but the founders declined to disclose how much they raised or the valuation. Google also agreed to supply computing capacity for the startup's first year.

The new management

Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind before Google bought it in 2014, is giving up day-to-day operating duties while remaining chief executive of the drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs. He will advise DeepMind's leaders from its Platform 37 offices in London and work closely with Pichai on strategic and global AGI matters.

Kavukcuoglu has spent over 13 years at DeepMind as of the Aug. 5 announcement. Pichai's memo credits him with starting its deep-learning team and leading work on WaveNet and DQN. His remit now covers Gemini development, frontier research, the Gemini app and developer teams, with the next major model, Gemini 4.

Google presented the changes as a way to accelerate. Hassabis wrote that Google was “the only company that has the full stack.” The memo said the Gemini app had reached more than 950 million monthly users by Aug. 5. That is a company-disclosed figure with no independent audit.

The market's read

Investors supplied a less comfortable measure on the day of the announcement. Alphabet shares fell more than 5% on the news, Bloomberg reported. At 12:08 p.m. in New York on Aug. 5, the stock was down more than 4% at $362.31.

The reaction arrived while Alphabet was already spending heavily on the computing infrastructure behind its AI plans. In its latest reported quarter, Google turned cash flow negative for the first time on record because of capital expenditure, while forecasting as much as $205 billion in capital spending for full-year 2026, CNBC reported. One trading session cannot show how much of the decline investors assigned to the departures rather than that spending.

The internal picture was also less settled than the memos suggested. Axios reported that DeepMind employees had pushed back amid a series of departures and that Gemini 3.5 Pro was months behind. Unnamed company sources attributed part of the delay to low morale. The report did not name those sources or provide Google's internal model schedule.

Why researchers leave

Tim Rocktäschel left Google earlier in 2026 to help found Recursive Superintelligence, another company pursuing AI that can improve itself. Rocktäschel described the difference this way: “It is just a very different environment inside a start-up. It is much more fast-paced and focused. You are a smaller team. There is much less bureaucracy and politics.”

Dean made a related case in an interview at his Silicon Valley home. Discovery Loop is organized as a public benefit corporation, a for-profit structure intended to serve a public or social purpose. “We might make decisions that are not necessarily in the company's purist financial interests,” he told The New York Times.

Before launch, the four founders had not yet hired anyone else or rented office space. When the interviewer asked who would be chief executive, Dean paused. “I think I'm the CEO,” he said, sheepishly. “Everyone pointed at me.”

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Marcus Schuler

San Francisco

Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: editor@implicator.ai