Alphabet, the big tech company and parent of Google, announced a major restructuring of its AI team on Wednesday (5 August) after Jeff Dean, a senior executive and one of Alphabet's AI pioneers, decided to resign amid mounting pressure as Google’s AI model development began to lag behind the market. Previously, many researchers and senior AI executives had left to join other major AI companies or to start their own AI startups.
Jeff Dean, who had worked at Google's parent company for over 27 years, recently decided to leave the company, stepping down from his role as Chief Scientist to found a new AI startup with three former Google executives.
According to an internal memo released by Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, will step down from his CEO role and be promoted to Chairman of Google DeepMind, while also taking over as Alphabet's Chief Scientist, replacing Jeff Dean.
Jeff Dean He is one of Google's AI pioneers and has played a key role in many technological advances at the company. He joined Google in 1999 as the 30th employee.
Over more than 27 years, he was instrumental in building the infrastructure behind Google Search, including the Crawling and Indexing systems that collect and organize internet data, as well as the Query Serving system that processes and displays search results to users.
In the AI era, he contributed significantly to developing the Gemini multimodal model capable of processing text, images, audio, and video, and was a leader in Google's pioneering AI research.
Google stated that the parting with Jeff Dean was amicable and that the company will invest in his new startup. Sundar Pichai said, “After 27 years of outstanding contributions, Jeff Dean has reached a point where he wants to try new things, and we are very pleased to continue supporting him.”
, Demis Hassabis He is a co-founder of DeepMind, an AI research lab acquired by Google in 2014. DeepMind has been responsible for managing Alphabet's foundational AI models over the years.
Although Demis Hassabis will step down as CEO, he confirmed his next plans: “This is the right time to hand over DeepMind's daily management to others so I can focus fully on the big picture and help shape the future direction.”
He will collaborate with Sundar Pichai on strategic and global AI issues and continue overseeing Isomorphic Labs, an AI startup for drug discovery spun off from DeepMind but still under Alphabet.
The restructuring also includes appointing Koray Kavukcuoglu, Chief Technology Officer of Google DeepMind, as the new head of AI at Alphabet. He will lead the development of Gemini 4, Google's next-generation AI model, and report directly to Sundar Pichai.
Jeff Dean, having left Alphabet, will serve as CEO of his new company named Discovery Loop This startup was founded by him and three former Alphabet researchers: Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, and Sanjay Ghemawat.
All four are leading Google researchers behind major advances in fields ranging from mathematics and structural biology to AI, and are among the most highly cited researchers worldwide.
The company is established as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) with the goal of using AI to accelerate technological progress by automating complex, multi-step scientific and engineering tasks.
Initially, Discovery Loop will focus on developing technology to automate machine learning research and engineering via its proprietary technology stack.
In the long term, the company aims to apply this technology to areas such as hardware design, drug discovery, and global challenges like clean energy.
Alphabet will support Discovery Loop with cloud infrastructure and computing power and will invest in the company, while Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures will lead the seed funding round.
Jeff Dean revealed he started seriously considering founding a new company about five weeks ago and contacted longtime colleagues to discuss building a new infrastructure that would enable broad automation of scientific research.
All four agreed that pursuing this mission required starting their own company, stating, “We want to build something different from how Google is currently operating.”
They believe Google's infrastructure is designed to support consumer applications, large-scale advertising systems, and Search, which have very different requirements than research infrastructure.
This restructuring comes amid instability at Google, which has yet to regain leadership in the AI market despite massive ongoing investments. Sundar Pichai stated, “We need to move faster with clear goals. We are committed to leading AI development and are fully focused on areas where we still need to improve.”
However, Google's heavy AI spending has led to negative cash flow for the first time in history due to increased capital expenditures, which are expected to reach $205 billion for the year.
In addition to Jeff Dean's resignation, Google has lost several other top talents recently.
These include Noam Shazeer, co-author of the 2017 Transformer Architecture paper foundational to the AI revolution, and John Jumper, a researcher who won a Nobel Prize in 2024 for AlphaFold. Both have joined OpenAI and Anthropic respectively.
Meanwhile, Google has been unable to launch the new flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro model as scheduled, and following Jeff Dean's resignation announcement, Alphabet's stock dropped about 4%.
Despite the massive investment, Google's AI business continues to grow strongly. Google Cloud, under Thomas Kurian, is growing faster than major competitors Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
In the recently reported second quarter, Google Cloud earned $24.8 billion, growing 82%, outpacing AWS's 37% and Microsoft Azure's 43% growth.
Sources:CNBC,WSJ,Fortune,Wired,TechCrunch
Follow the Facebook page: Thairath Money at this link -https://www.facebook.com/ThairathMoney