Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le leave DeepMind to cofound Discovery Loop

[AINews] Jeff, Sanjay, Oriol, and Quoc depart DeepMind; Demis to Chair; Koray to SVP — what is going on at GDM???

Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le announced they are leaving Google DeepMind to cofound Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on automating machine learning. Demis Hassabis steps down as CEO to become Chair of DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over as SVP. Google is investing in Discovery Loop and the departures are described as amicable, but the post does not explain why the project couldn't be built inside Google. The author connects this to earlier exits by John Jumper and Noam Shazeer, and notes DeepMind hasn't shipped a Gemini Pro update in six months.

Why it matters: The simultaneous departure of four core Google/DeepMind figures to start a new company is an industry-shaking personnel move. The headline facts are solid even though the full body is behind a paywall.