Google's Chief Scientist Jeff Dean Leaves for AI Startup Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist and one of its earliest employees, has left the company after 27 years to co-found AI startup Discovery Loop. In a farewell presentation at the KDD Conference in South Korea, he shared a timeline of his final two days at Google, which began with a video call to around 139 close colleagues on Wednesday morning. The meeting was described as emotional, with 'tears, lots of chats running on the side' and an 'explosion of heart and sad face emojis.'

Dean then announced Discovery Loop's launch via public announcement and internal farewell email, which listed some of his key contributions to Google, including MapReduce and BigTable. A party was held for him at 2:30 PM, but he spent the evening answering around 400 goodbye messages on his corporate account before shutting down his laptop.

The urgency behind answering these messages was technical - the corporate account was set to expire, taking all internal chats with it. This meant that around 250 more messages arrived after Dean went to sleep at 2:30 AM, which he noted would be lost in eight hours if not replied to.

Dean's exit comes as part of a wider AI reshuffle at Google, with Demis Hassabis moving out of the Google DeepMind CEO role into a chairman post and CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu elevated to SVP. Discovery Loop is backed by Alphabet, Radical Ventures, and Khosla Ventures, aiming to automate experimental loops in machine learning, chip design, and drug discovery.