Jeff Dean Leaves Google to Launch Research Automation Company with Former Googlers

The Google leadership reshuffle comes alongside another high-profile departure: Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist and a 27-year veteran of the company, is leaving to co-found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on automating machine learning, scientific research and engineering, Beatrice Nolan reported for Fortune Tech.

Google chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving the company to co-found a new research-automation venture with former Google colleagues. [Photo: Radical Ventures X]

Dean is joined by former Google researchers Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le.

Alphabet is a founding investor in the new company and will provide cloud-computing resources.

The departures come at a challenging time for Google. The company's next flagship model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, is reportedly months behind its original June launch target.

Google has also experienced several departures among the leadership and research teams working on Gemini, including former Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer, who left for OpenAI, and Nobel laureate John Jumper, who joined Anthropic.