Alphabet stock (NASDAQ: GOOG) fell as much as 6% on Wednesday and closed 4.06% lower at $360.11 after reports that longtime Google executive Jeff Dean and several other artificial intelligence veterans were leaving to form a new venture. The departures coincided with a broader restructuring of the company’s AI leadership.
Alphabet Stock Slide Accompanies Discovery Loop Plans
Dean, one of Google’s earliest employees and a leading architect of its AI strategy, is departing to co-found Discovery Loop with Google veterans Quoc Le, Oriol Vinyals, and Sanjay Ghemawat, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
The new company, structured as a public-benefit corporation, plans to develop systems that can automate complex, multistep scientific and engineering experiments. It will initially build an internal technology platform for automated machine-learning research before expanding into hardware design, drug discovery and clean energy.
Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) will remain connected to the venture as a founding investor and cloud-computing partner, while Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures will co-lead its seed financing round.
The move marks a significant transition for Dean, who became Google’s 30th employee in 1999 and later co-founded Google Brain in 2011. He said planning for Discovery Loop began five weeks earlier, with plans to create specialized infrastructure outside Google’s existing technology environment.
“We wanted to build something differently than how things are built at Google right now,” Ghemawat said. He added that Google’s systems are designed primarily for large consumer applications, search and advertising rather than specialized research infrastructure.
Those concerns help explain the founders’ decision to build independently, even as Alphabet maintains a financial and technical relationship with the startup. Their exits also add to other reported departures from Google’s AI ranks, including Character.AI co-founder Noam Shazeer’s move to OpenAI and Nobel laureate John Jumper’s departure for Anthropic.
Google Reshapes DeepMind Leadership
As those veteran researchers prepare to leave, Google is also reorganizing the leadership overseeing its most advanced AI work.
Demis Hassabis will step away from day-to-day operational duties at Google DeepMind and become chair of the unit and chief scientist of Alphabet. He will continue to lead Isomorphic Labs.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously Google DeepMind’s chief technology officer and chief AI architect, was promoted to senior vice president of Google DeepMind and will report directly to Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
In that role, Kavukcuoglu will oversee Gemini model development, frontier research, and developer teams. The 13-year DeepMind veteran led early breakthroughs including WaveNet and DQN.
Pichai linked the leadership transition to the long-term contributions of Dean and Ghemawat, crediting them with helping drive major technological shifts during their 27 years at Google. Their work spanned early search infrastructure, Tensor Processing Units, and modern deep learning networks.
Although they are leaving the company, the relationship will continue through Alphabet’s planned research and cloud partnerships with Discovery Loop.
