Two Google AI veterans — Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat — have decided to exit the DeepMind team after serving 27-years each at the search engine giant. The development was revealed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Wednesday as he announced a rejig of senior-level roles within its DeepMind team.
Both, Dean and Ghemawat, are considered pioneers of Google’s AI technology. Together they built Google’s core infrastructure like MapReduce and Bigtable to handle massive datasets. They also played a pivotal role in developing Google’s flagship AI models like PaLM and Gemini.
The birth of Discord Loop AI
The duo has decided to launch an independent public benefit corporation following their DeepMind exit. This body dubbed Discord Loop AI aims to fuel innovation in the areas of machine learning (ML) along with advanced science and engineering.
Pichai said despite their Google departures, the company will not be severing ties with Dean and Ghemawat. Google will be the founding investor in their public benefit corporation and also be their Cloud partner.
“it’s been a privilege to work alongside Jeff and Sanjay, We’ll continue to work with them and collaborate on a research framework for ML systems and related infrastructure advances,” Pichai noted.
Dean posted the news of his departure on X looking back at his time at Google and having watched the company’s staff grow from 25 people to over 190,000.
Google’s AI reshuffle
Pichai has projected a bright future for Gemini and Google’s broader AI efforts citing its present market position. He claimed that since its launch on 2023, the Gemini app has breached the 950 million mark of monthly users.
In the next leg of its advanced technologies initiatives, Google plans to explore robotics and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — both of which aim to finetune how autunomous technologies can learn, reason, and solve problems independently across multiple domains.
To add more internal efficiency to its teams, Google has named Demis Hassabis as the Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. The role of Google DeepMind’s Senior Vice President (SVP) has been designated to Koray Kavukcuoglu.
Hassabis had co-founded DeepMind in 2010 which was acquired by Google in 2014. He has perviously served as the CEO of Google DeepMind. Kavukcuoglu, meanwhile, her been the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Google DeepMind among other roles in the company.
As part of their new jobs, both Hassabis and Kavukcuoglu will focus broadly on Google’s AGI strategies, AI policies, and frontier AI research with Gemini in focus.
Google is among several other tech firms that is shifting the spotlight to its AI initiatives. For 2026, Alphabet expects its capital expenditures to reach between $195 billion to $205 billion, with most funding allocated towards strengthening its AI infrastructures and data centres.
In a bid to streamline its teams along with its projected AI spending, the company has reportedly been laying off employees, especially from smaller teams. On Wednesday itself, reports of Google laying off 52 staffers from its Cloud division made it to the headlines without an official announcement from the company on any of its social media channels.
Concerned over job securities amid heavy AI-driven layoffs in the tech ecosystem, Google employees have called for better severance packages and buyout options from the $4.36 trillion company. As reported by The Guardian, over 4,500 Google staffers have signed the petition, expected more layoffs to follow.
