Google DeepMind Shakeup: Hassabis Moves to Chair as Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat Exit to Launch Discovery Loop

Discovery Loop is the new PBC, Google is investing as a founding investor and cloud partner, but honestly it looks like a soft retirement plan dressed up as leaving. It's confusing whether this counts as really leaving Google or not.

Absolute earthquake at DeepMind these last few months, no other way to put it.

Jeff Dean's own tweet says Discovery Loop is founded with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, all people he's worked with for 14 to 30 years. Wild that four of Google's most important AI people are walking out together.

Makes total sense to me. Frontier models are running out of good data, mostly scraped text and images, so if you want real scientific discovery you need direct access to physics, chemistry, and biology experiments. That's probably what they're chasing now.

Is the subtext here that Demis was blocking what Dean and the others wanted to do, so they had no choice but to leave and do it independently?

Hassabis is arguably the most important figure in AI over the last 15 years, even indirectly. OpenAI itself exists partly because Musk got fixated on stopping him.

This is a promotion for Demis, not a demotion. I'd bet it's a path for him to become Alphabet CEO in the AI era eventually, Sundar feels like a mobile era CEO who might not last three more years.

Google stock dropped 5% on this news, something like $200B in value gone. Jeff and Sanjay alone might be worth close to that.

For a year the standard defense of Google being behind OpenAI and Anthropic was 'they've got Dean and Hassabis.' Now they don't have either in the same capacity, so what's left to be bullish about?

Wait, is Jeff actually leaving full time to run this venture, or is it a side project? Reads like the former and that's way bigger than I first thought.

In theory the stock should go up, his tenure is why Google fell behind in the first place.

I bought more on the dip. This is great news long term, people are sleeping on it, Sundar will probably step aside and Demis becomes the real CEO.

Weird that an announcement like this drops mid trading day. Feels like it might have leaked and they were forced to move fast.

DeepMind built some of the coolest stuff ever, AlphaGo, AlphaStar, all of it. Hope Google actually uses this team well going forward.

Anyone watching Gemini's release pace has been disappointed for a while now, Anthropic and OpenAI have clearly passed them. Would love to hear from someone inside on why it's so chaotic.

Not GDM myself, but the internal politics were suffocating when I was there, everyone will tell you something different about why.

Between Shazeer leaving earlier and now these guys, looks like Gemini's underwhelming results are claiming heads.

I just watched one of the best engineers I know leave DeepMind, and now I think I understand part of the why. Not a good sign for Google's AI effort.

I disagree, Google has the money, the chips, and can attract talent, I'd be shocked if they don't win long term.

From outside it really does look like they're asleep at the wheel. Qwen, Deepseek, and Kimi are crushing them on the cheap open side, and they can't touch top tier models like Opus on the premium side. Maybe Hassabis's personal pull toward AI-for-science over consumer product hurt them commercially.

Everyone here reads this as Demis leaving Google, but that's literally not what the announcement says.

His influence clearly shrinks either way though, feels like a calculated move to not freak people out while he's effectively on his way out.

I'd bet real money the chairman title is a contractual thing and he's gone the moment it expires.