# Google DeepMind Leadership Exodus: Jeff Dean, Ghemawat, Vinyals Leave to Form Discovery Loop

> On August 5, four of Google's most senior AI figures walked out the door together: chief scientist Jeff Dean, Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, research VP Oriol Vinyals, and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le. Their new venture, Discovery Loop, is set up as a public benefit corporation with a single ambition: automate the experimental loop at the heart of scientific research, starting with machine learning itself before moving into drug discovery and clean energy. The timing is pointed. The departures land as DeepMind reshuffles its top ranks, with Demis Hassabis stepping back from day-to-day leadership and Koray Kavukcuoglu elevated to senior VP. Radical Ventures and Khosla are backing the round, and, in an unusual twist, Alphabet is investing too, keeping a foot in the door of the company its own veterans just left to build. Losing this much institutional memory at once is a genuine blow, but the bigger signal is where the talent is headed. The premise that AI can run its own research loops, generating hypotheses, testing them, and improving itself, is becoming the field's next frontier, and some of the people who built modern deep learning now want to chase it outside Big Tech.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: TechCrunch · Published Monday, August 10, 2026_

## Wortins' read

On August 5, four of Google's most senior AI figures walked out the door together: chief scientist Jeff Dean, Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, research VP Oriol Vinyals, and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le. Their new venture, Discovery Loop, is set up as a public benefit corporation with a single ambition: automate the experimental loop at the heart of scientific research, starting with machine learning itself before moving into drug discovery and clean energy. The timing is pointed. The departures land as DeepMind reshuffles its top ranks, with Demis Hassabis stepping back from day-to-day leadership and Koray Kavukcuoglu elevated to senior VP. Radical Ventures and Khosla are backing the round, and, in an unusual twist, Alphabet is investing too, keeping a foot in the door of the company its own veterans just left to build. Losing this much institutional memory at once is a genuine blow, but the bigger signal is where the talent is headed. The premise that AI can run its own research loops, generating hypotheses, testing them, and improving itself, is becoming the field's next frontier, and some of the people who built modern deep learning now want to chase it outside Big Tech.

## Source

[Read the full story at TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/05/jeff-dean-and-other-top-ai-researchers-are-leaving-google-to-launch-their-own-startup/)

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