This Week In AI: Google loses its brightest minds, and Gemini is still a good boy (in bad way)

Published 9 August 2026 · tech

I In 2026 when we think of AI, the names that come to mind are OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek and the likes. But this used to

I In 2026 when we think of AI, the names that come to mind are OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek and the likes. But this used to be different, very different 10 years ago. Then if someone mentioned AI, it was certain that their next word would be Google. This is because Google has been OG in the world of AI. In 2017 I attended Google IO, the annual conference where the company showed all the new stuff it was working on. Writing from Mountain View, I filed a piece with the headline — I/O 2017 shows Google is no longer a search company, it's an AI company. Read Full Story This is how early Google was in AI. ChatGPT was still 5 years away. Anthropic was yet to be born. Alexander Wang, the AI boss at Meta, then had just left MIT and was beginning to wonder what he should do next. Most people are not aware of how Google has laid the foundation of technologies that eventually birthed ChatGPT and Claude. In fact, the entire LLM architecture is based on Attention Is All You Need, a research paper that eight Googlers wrote in 2017. Within Google the people who laid the foundation for modern internet and AI are some of its most-storied engineers, notably Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. This week, however, the world learnt more about them. Because they all decided to quit Google and form a new company. Jeff announced it. And then revealed who all are going to be part of Discovery Loop, a company that aims to create fundamental bits of AI that can make science, manufacturing, engineering and research smarter. Sanjay Ghemawat, who was schooled in Kota in Rajasthan, is part of the team. And so are Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le. Jeff has been the engineering heart of Google for over 25 years, since he joined the company in 1999. Same goes for Sanjay. Fun fact: The biggest achievement an engineer can have within Google is reaching the stage where they are deemed Google Fellow. Quoc Le is one of the Fellows. But guess where Jeff and Sanjay are on the ladder? They are the ONLY two SENIOR Google Fellows in the history of the company. No one else has gotten that distinction. Oriol Vinyals, meanwhile, was VP of AI research and co-lead of Google Gemini. In 2026 if you go look for Einsteins and Bohrs of the computing world, people like Jeff and Sanjay would be on the list.

Just hear it from them as they introduce the Discovery Loop team. “Between us, we have pioneered massive scale computing and led the creation of critical infrastructure, products, and foundational AI advances that the world relies on,” they write. People who follow the world of Silicon Valley would recognise that this assertion is actually an understatement. Because people like Jeff did not only build Google into a deep tech company. They improved and invented technologies that power the entire modern internet. There are reports that Google CEO Sundar Pichai tried to keep Jeff and his friends within Google. That evidently failed, so Google did the next best thing: It decided to invest in Discovery Loop. Pichai did something similar — next best thing — with Demis Hassabis, the DeepMind CEO and a Nobel prize winner who reportedly almost followed Jeff as he was walking out of the door. Demis is no longer the CEO of DeepMind, the brain of Google’s AI effort. Instead, he will become its chairperson and will focus on long-term AI research instead of creating a chatbot that can code and crack jokes. With its top minds no longer at helm, there has been a lot of doom and gloom talk around Google and its ability to compete with the likes of OpenAI. The day Jeff left, the company’s stock went down by little over 5 per cent within minutes. But I don’t buy into Google doom talk. The organisation is big, or as Vinod Khosla, who is also investing in Discovery Loop, says, “This is far from game over. Google still has one of the deepest benches of talent in the AI industry.” Rather, my impression is that leadership changes at Google might actually help the company and Pichai in chasing OpenAI and Anthropic. Jeff, Sanjay, Demis are legends in the world of AI and tech. But because they are legends I feel they are also after Barracuda and not Hilsa. They probably aim to chase something more substantial than a chatbot like ChatGPT or coding assistant like Claude Code. Whereas Google as a company, and Pichai as its CEO, will like to create AI that its users love and utilise in their daily lives. Pichai wants to compete with Altman and Dario. There is a possibility now that the legends are out of the company to focus on bigger challenges, Google can finally go all out on snaring the bite-size fish that consumers want. II Every company in the world of AI talks about the safety of its AI systems.