Overview
- Jeff Dean announced on Wednesday that he is leaving Alphabet after 27 years to found Discovery Loop, a Public Benefit Corporation aimed at automating scientific research and experiments with machine learning.
- Alphabet, Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are named as initial backers, with Alphabet committing to act as a founding investor and to supply Google Cloud infrastructure to the new company.
- In a parallel move, Demis Hassabis will step back from day-to-day DeepMind operations to become DeepMind president and Alphabet chief scientist focused on long-term AGI strategy.
- Koray Kavukcuoglu is promoted to senior vice president to run DeepMind’s operational work and to oversee Gemini model development and Frontier AI research.
- The announcements triggered an immediate market reaction, with Alphabet shares dropping about 5%, and raise fresh questions about talent mobility, investor pressure from heavy AI spending, and competition from rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic.