Alphabet's Top AI Researchers Leave for New Venture Backed by Their Former Employer

Alphabet's four top AI researchers, including its chief scientist Jeff Dean and senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, have left the company to start a new venture called Discovery Loop. They will be joined by Oriol Vinyals, co-lead of Google's Gemini models, and Quoc Le, a founding member of the Google Brain team.

The researchers are leaving Alphabet with its blessing, as the company is investing in Discovery Loop and will provide it with cloud computing capacity. This move has caused a 4% drop in Alphabet's shares, erasing $185 billion from its market value.

Jeff Dean, who joined Google in 1999, was instrumental in building the company's technical foundation, including its search infrastructure and AI models. His departure, along with that of other top researchers, has raised concerns about the impact on Alphabet's AI research and development.

However, CEO Sundar Pichai has downplayed the significance of their departure, stating that they are trying something new and Alphabet is excited to support them in that endeavor. The company has also appointed Demis Hassabis as its chief scientist and chair of Google DeepMind, and Koray Kavukcuoglu as the senior vice president leading the development of Gemini 4.