Google's Chief Scientist Jeff Dean Leaves After 27 Years As DeepMind Undergoes Massive Restructuring

Google's chief scientist Jeff Dean has left the company after 27 years to launch a new research organization named Discovery Loop, alongside fellow veteran engineer Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. Alphabet will serve as a founding investor and cloud partner in the newly established public benefit corporation, collaborating on machine-learning systems and advanced infrastructure. The departure coincides with a comprehensive restructuring of Google's artificial intelligence operations announced by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind, is stepping down from day-to-day operational control of the laboratory to assume the role of chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of parent company Alphabet. Hassabis will direct his focus toward artificial general intelligence, foundational strategy, and Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AI-driven drug-discovery venture. Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously DeepMind's chief technology officer and Google's chief AI architect, has been appointed senior vice president of Google DeepMind. Kavukcuoglu now exercises unified operational command over frontier-model research, Gemini model development, the Gemini consumer application, and developer teams. The consolidation places development and deployment under a single executive leader to streamline execution speed. The structural overhaul follows a wave of high-profile departures from Google's AI ranks. Over a two-month period, eight prominent researchers exited the company, including Noam Shazeer, who joined OpenAI, and John Jumper, who moved to Anthropic. Alphabet reported capital expenditures of $44.9 billion in the second quarter, largely directed toward artificial intelligence infrastructure, and raised its projected 2026 capital expenditure target to betwe