{
  "id": 186557,
  "title": "Google’s four AI departures: “We wanted to build something differently”",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/05/googles-four-ai-departures-we-wanted-to-build-something-differently",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-08-05T18:44:10.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The New Stack",
    "slug": "the-new-stack",
    "url": "https://thenewstack.io/deepmind-discovery-loop-departures/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "In early 2025, speculation arose that Google lagged behind OpenAI in the AI race. By December, Alphabet was enjoying its strongest year since 2009, buoyed by expanding confidence in Gemini and Google's overall AI strategy. Much of this progress stemmed from DeepMind, the British AI lab Google bought for around $659 million in 2014. Now, Google is reshuffling its leadership and losing four of its most prominent engineers who will join a new venture called Discovery Loop.\n\nDeepMind's leader, Demis Hassabis, will transition from day-to-day operations to become chair of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's chief technology officer and Google's chief AI architect, will now lead Gemini model development, frontier AI research, the Gemini app, and its developer teams.\n\nJeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le are departing Google to establish Discovery Loop, a public-benefit corporation aiming to automate scientific and engineering research using AI. As a founding investor and cloud provider, Google will maintain involvement in Discovery Loop. The company seeks to leverage AI to expedite the development of scientific and engineering research.\n\nDeepMind, described by Hassabis as the \"engine room\" of Google's AI efforts, has been instrumental in developing Google's core AI technology before distributing it across various products. To accelerate AI integration, DeepMind overhauled Google's infrastructure, making strides in hardware through the development of a custom chip for Gemini.\n\nThe reshuffling comes after Google achieved milestones such as Gemini 2.5's release in March 2025 and the impending release of Gemini 4. The turnover of key engineers from Google to Discovery Loop includes Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, whose expertise in machine learning, infrastructure, and core technologies will be harnessed to create an AI-driven research automation platform.\n\nDiscovery Loop aims to work on machine learning, science, and engineering problems by automating the experimental cycle, from proposing and conducting experiments to evaluating results and determining the next steps. The startup's infrastructure is designed to support this unique approach, offering a departure from Google's conventional methods. Google will continue to support Discovery Loop through investment and a cloud partnership, granting the startup access to computing resources and a stake in any discoveries made.",
  "summary": "At the start of 2025, investors wondered whether Google could keep pace with OpenAI. By December, Alphabet was completing its The post Google’s four AI departures: “We wanted to build something differently” appeared first on The New Stack .",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}