Google's AI talent exodus: Hassabis steps back, Jeff Dean launches Discovery Loop, a Gemini lead joins Coreau

A brutal week for Google's AI leadership: its most senior researchers headed for the exits on three fronts.

#Hassabis down as CEO to become chair

Demis Hassabis, the Nobel-winning scientist who led Google DeepMind, is stepping down as CEO to become chair, taking on a broader research role. Google announced the move minutes after four of its top researchers said they were leaving.

#Jeff Dean & co. launch Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean announced Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI) — founded with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le — a public-benefit corporation whose mission is to automate machine-learning research.

#A Gemini lead joins Coreau

@arohan, a pre-training lead on Gemini after years at Google Brain and Anthropic, co-founded Coreau (@coreautoai) with @MillionInt, who ran the reasoning team at OpenAI — "to find what comes next" after the transformer scaling era.

Sources on X:

• @JeffDean — Discovery Loop announcement
• @MeryemArik9 — Hassabis steps down to become chair
• @sonyatweetybird — Coreau founding