Senior Google DeepMind engineers Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le are leaving to cofound a new autoresearch startup called Discovery Loop. Concurrently, Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO to become Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist at Alphabet, while Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over as SVP.

  • The four departing engineers are founding Discovery Loop, a Public Benefit Corporation aimed at automating machine learning, science, and engineering workflows.
  • Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are leading the seed round for Discovery Loop, with participation from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, Doerr Capital, and Alphabet.
  • Demis Hassabis is moving to focus on long-term strategy, AGI, and science, explicitly stepping back from day-to-day operations.
  • Koray Kavukcuoglu assumes operational control as SVP of DeepMind, overseeing Gemini, frontier research, and product teams.

The leadership reshuffle is viewed as a governance reset and an attempt to sharpen product execution around Gemini, while the new startup signals that AI-for-science is becoming a primary frontier.