Alphabet Loses Top AI Researchers to New Startup Backed by Own Investment
Alphabet's Chief Scientist Jeff Dean and three other senior AI researchers have left Google to start their own company, Discovery Loop. The four researchers, who spent a combined total of over 70 years at Google, are building an artificial intelligence platform that automates scientific and engineering research.
The new company has received investment from Alphabet, which will also serve as its cloud partner. This move is seen as a significant loss for Google, but one that it can afford due to the company's strong financials. Alphabet reported 24% revenue growth in the second quarter, with its cloud segment growing at an accelerating pace of 82%.
The researchers who left include Dean, who was Google's chief scientist and spent 27 years at the company; Sanjay Ghemawat, a senior fellow and engineering partner to Dean for over two decades; Oriol Vinyals, a co-lead of Google's Gemini models; and Quoc Le, a founding member of the Google Brain team.
Despite the loss of these key researchers, Alphabet is not seen as significantly impacted. The company's growth comes from advertising and demand for cloud computing capacity, both of which are still growing.