Days after Google unveiled its first Gemini chatbot in 2023 to compete with ChatGPT, Jeff Dean went to an AI conference where he was promptly swarmed by attendees. Suddenly, the Google executive looked at his watch and realized he was due to give a talk minutes later, spurring a rush to take selfies with the influential tech leader before he left.Now, it’s the employees at Google who are bracing for the AI pioneer’s exit. Dean, who started at the company more than two decades ago, said Wednesday that he is leaving Google alongside colleagues Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals to build a startup called Discovery Loop. The announcement was part of a broader executive shuffle that saw Google DeepMind head Demis Hassabis shift into a chairman role at the AI lab.Dean’s move represents one of the most significant departures from Google’s AI organization in years and comes at a moment of uncertainty about its ability to keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. Current and former employees said morale inside Google dipped following the company’s AI leadership shakeup and predicted the loss of Dean would make it more difficult to recruit top AI talent.Dean, who joined Google as employee number 30 in 1999, has played a key role in nearly all of the company’s major products, from search to ads to chips, culminating in his work guiding artificial intelligence advances as the company’s chief scientist.“He created modern deep learning in many ways,” said Dogus Cubuk, who spent years working with Dean at Google and counts him as an investor in his startup, Periodic Labs.As a co-founder of Google Brain in 2011, Dean was a face of the company’s AI efforts for 15 years. In 2016, he and two dozen co-authors, including Ghemawat, pioneered TensorFlow, which is open-source software that lets people more easily build AI systems. He and Ghemawat also developed MapReduce to dramatically improve the ability to process huge datasets.His tenure was not without controversy. Two co-heads of Google’s ethical AI team were ousted several years ago after Dean raised concerns about a paper they’d produced on the risks of large language models. Though Dean had been an early champion of the researchers, his relationship with the group fractured due, among other things, to researchers feeling he was too slow to handle a harassment allegation. Google at the time defended its handling of the issue. Dean has also occasionally taken public positions on contentious issues. Earlier this year, he condemned the killing of protesters by officers from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a post on X. Later, he joined other Google and OpenAI employees in filing an amicus brief supporting Anthropic PBC in its legal standoff with the Pentagon.In recent years, Dean has had less of an operational and product role as Google merged Brain with DeepMind under the leadership of Hassabis. But he continued to exert influence, including by serving as a bridge between Google’s AI software and chips teams, with an emphasis on tying the development of both homegrown efforts more closely together.Throughout, Dean continued to be a fixture at Google who not only shaped its most important technological work but also embodied its culture. “He’s probably the most Google person that was at Google,” Cubuk said. One person described the mood at a going-away party this week for Dean as jovial, noting many staffers were happy for him.Dean also extended his influence far beyond Google’s walls by investing in more than 100 startups since at least 2014, according to data compiled by PitchBook. Many of those investments were made in the last three years, as the AI boom picked up.With his own startup, Dean aims to use AI to automate difficult science and engineering tasks. Discovery Loop plans to be its own first customer, before moving to a more general approach that will address areas like hardware and material design, drug discovery and clean energy. (The startup declined to make Dean available for comment.)“Demis and Jeff are prioritizing their passion for applying AI to scientific discovery and related innovations – especially in the area of life sciences,” said Matt McIlwain, managing director at Madrona Ventures. Alphabet is among the backers for Dean’s new startup. Discovery Loop also intends to use Google for computing resources, meaning the tech firm may still benefit from Dean for the foreseeable future. “You know the famous line, ‘You’re not losing a son, you’re gaining a daughter-in-law?” said Oren Etzioni, an emeritus professor at the University of Washington and founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “Here, you’re losing a Jeff Dean, but you’re also gaining a Jeff Dean elsewhere in the Alphabet family.”Metz, Bass and Alba write for Bloomberg.
