Google hit by earthquake, its top minds Jeff Dean and Demis Hassabis no longer in driving seats
Google's AI division is going through one of its biggest leadership shake-ups in years. Within days, the company has seen two of its most influential
Google's AI division is going through one of its biggest leadership shake-ups in years. Within days, the company has seen two of its most influential AI figures step away from the roles that made them the public faces of Google's AI ambitions. Jeff Dean, one of Google's earliest employees and the engineer behind many of its foundational technologies, has announced he is leaving the company after 27 years. At the same time, Demis Hassabis is giving up the CEO role at Google DeepMind to move into a research position at Alphabet. Read Full Story While neither move means the leaders are walking away from AI altogether, it leaves Google entering one of the most intense phases of the AI race without two of the people who have long been steering the ship. The timing is especially important. Google is trying to catch up with rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic after facing delays in rolling out some of its next-generation AI models like Gemini 3.5 Pro. Against that backdrop, losing one AI icon and reshuffling another has sparked questions about how the company plans to regain momentum. Jeff Dean's exit ends a 27-year Google chapter A screenshot of what Jeff Dean tweeted about his exit from Google. Jeff Dean isn't just another senior executive leaving Google.
He joined the company in 1999 as roughly its 30th employee, when Google was still a tiny startup with only a couple of dozen people. Over nearly three decades, Dean helped build many of the technologies that powered Google's rise. Alongside longtime collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat, he co-created systems such as MapReduce and Bigtable, technologies that became the backbone of modern large-scale computing. Later, he played a central role in Google Brain, Gemini and several of Google's AI research efforts. Announcing his departure on X, Dean said, "Tomorrow will be my last day at Google after 27 years... It has been an absolute pleasure to work with you and to help build some of the most widely used and impactful products of all time." He also added that watching Google grow from around 25 employees to more than 190,000 had been an "amazing journey." Dean also said it still brings him joy to see billions of people using Google's products every day, from Search and Gmail to AI systems and autonomous vehicles. But retirement is not on the cards. Instead, Dean is launching a new AI startup called Discovery Loop with Google's top software engineer Sanjay Ghemawat, DeepMind research leader Oriol Vinyals and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le. In other words, some of the top AI minds at Google have joined hands to create a new company.
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