TLDRocket
5 August 2026
Google's AI division is fracturing under competitive pressure. Demis Hassabis stepped down as CEO of Google DeepMind to become Alphabet's chief scientist, ceding operational control to Koray Kavukcuoglu, while Jeff Dean—the company's longest-serving AI researcher—departed along with Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals to found Discovery Loop, a startup automating scientific research with AI. Google is funding the exodus, but the timing stings: Gemini 3.5 Pro is months behind schedule, and the departures signal that even world-class researchers see better prospects elsewhere.
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