Google's AI talent exodus: Hassabis steps back, Jeff Dean launches Discovery Loop, a Gemini lead joins Coreau
August 5, 2026Posted by Federico Ulfo
A brutal week for Google's AI leadership: its most senior researchers headed for the exits on three fronts.
Hassabis steps back
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
Press coverage:
- NYT — Google Names Demis Hassabis to New AI Role in a Leadership Shake-up
- NYT — Four Top Google A.I. Researchers Form New Start-Up
- TechCrunch — Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup
- Wired — 4 of Google's Top AI Brains Are Leaving—and Launching Their Own AI Startup
- The Verge — Google just announced a major shakeup of its top AI leadership
- Business Insider — Google shakes up AI leadership