At Google, yet another game of musical chairs in the artificial intelligence team.

"The next chapter in our AI momentum." That was the title of a statement released by Google on Wednesday, August 5th, in the latest episode of a wave of leadership changes at Google DeepMind, the division that focuses its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts.

In the statement, the tech giant announced that Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind to assume the roles of chairman and chief scientist for the operation. Koray Kavukcuoglu, the unit's chief technology officer, will now lead all AI model development for the company.

The changes don't stop there. Jeff Dean, who has been with Google since 1999 and is the 30th employee to join the company, is leaving along with Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, and Sanjay Ghemawat, three other veterans.

Included on lists of the world's most cited researchers, the quartet will be heading towards a new startup, created by them, which will also be focused on AI. Named Discovery Loop, its focus will be on applying this technology to automate complex tasks in the fields of science and engineering.

“We believe that by automating many of the classic aspects of the experimental cycle with machine learning models, complementing the work of scientists and engineers, we will be able to further explore space in broad areas of science to accelerate discoveries,” Dean said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal .

He noted that he began seriously considering the project five weeks ago, when he contacted Vinyals, his colleague and principal collaborator on AlphaFold, a renowned AI program that predicts protein structures and won the 2024 Nobel Prize.

The pair then connected with Le and Ghemawat and began discussing the development of the infrastructure needed to allow more branches of science to be automated, and what would be required to make such a project viable.

In a statement, Discovery Loop said that it will initially focus on automating processes through its own technology platform. And that it eventually plans to apply it to various areas, including hardware design and drug discovery.

The startup also reported that Alphabet, Google's parent company, is providing computing and cloud capacity for its operation and is also one of the investors in a seed funding round currently underway. The investment will be co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures .

Behind the project, the four researchers have known each other for over a decade. Le was a co-author and consultant for Google's AI systems that won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad.

Alongside Dean, Le was also one of the founders of Google Brain, the company's pioneering AI research team, in 2011. Two years later, Vinyals joined this team, which, in 2023, merged with other research areas of the tech giant and began operating as a single organization.

Dean, for his part, also led the development of Google's tensor processing units, the chips that power its language models and other technologies now sold to other companies.

Ghemawat, like Dean, was also one of the first employees of the big tech company. Together, they helped create Google's distributed systems in the early 2000s. And, in 2012, they were recognized by the Association for Computing Machinery for their work.

Now, the quartet understood that it was time to leave Google to dedicate themselves to the new mission. "We wanted to build something different from the way things are built at Google currently," Ghemawat told the American newspaper.

He explained that Google's infrastructure works well for large consumer-facing applications, large search engines, and advertising. But that it has "very different requirements" from the type of infrastructure they want to build for search.

Sundar Pichai , CEO of Alphabet, highlighted that Dean and Ghemawat helped drive some of the most significant technological transitions, from the initial infrastructure of search services to the neural networks that helped create the "modern era of AI".

“On a personal level, it was a privilege to work alongside Jeff and Sanjay, and I wish them all the best. We will continue to work with them as investors and cloud partners, and to collaborate on a research framework for machine learning systems and related infrastructure advancements,” Pichai said in the Google statement.

The fact is, praise aside, the departure of the quartet adds to the growing list of top AI talent that Google has lost in recent months. This scenario coincides with issues such as delays in launching a new AI model capable of competing on equal footing with OpenAI and Anthropic.

After making significant progress in this race with an updated version of Gemini, its AI model, in the second half of 2025, Google ended up losing momentum to its two rivals. And, in some cases, even Meta's models have surpassed Google's bet in this contest.

In this context, before Dean and company, the list of talents who left Google included names like Noam Shazeer, who recently joined OpenAI, and John Jumper, who left the tech giant to join Anthropic.