Alphabet Inc. shares slipped to a session low, down 5.4%, after reports that Jeff Dean, a 30‑year‑veteran and chief architect of Google’s artificial‑intelligence strategy for the past 15 years, is departing the company. Dean, who co‑founded Google Brain in 2011 and has been instrumental in developing Tensor Processing Units and deep‑learning models, announced he will launch a new public‑benefit corporation called Discovery Loop. The venture, co‑founded with fellow Google AI veterans Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat, aims to accelerate scientific breakthroughs by fully automating complex, multistep experiments in fields such as hardware design, drug discovery and clean energy. Discovery Loop will first build an internal technology stack to automate machine‑learning research before expanding outward. Alphabet will act as a founding investor and cloud‑computing partner, while seed‑round co‑lead investors include Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Dean began planning the startup five weeks ago, seeking to create infrastructure that differs from Google’s existing framework, which is optimized for massive consumer applications, search and advertising rather than specialized research, according to Ghemawat.

The departures add to a recent wave of high‑profile AI talent exits from Google, following Character.AI co‑founder Noam Shazeer’s move to OpenAI and Nobel laureate John Jumper’s transition to Anthropic. In parallel, Google published a blog outlining a broader restructuring of its AI leadership. Sundar Pichai, CEO of both Google and Alphabet, together with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, detailed the changes: Hassabis will step back from day‑to‑day operational duties at DeepMind to become Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s Chief Technology Officer and Chief AI Architect, has been promoted to Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai, and will oversee Gemini model development, frontier research and developer teams. Pichai praised Dean and Ghemawat for their 27‑year contributions that spanned early search infrastructure, TPUs and modern deep‑learning networks, and confirmed that Alphabet will maintain a research and cloud partnership with Discovery Loop moving forward.