DeepMind changes leadership: Demis Hassabis steps away from operations, replaced by Koray Kavukcuoglu, following the departure of the founders of the startup Discovery Loop
Demis Hassabis stepped down from operational leadership at DeepMind, and Koray Kavukcuoglu became the new leader; researchers from reinforcement learning teams continue to leave the company. This follows the departure of Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, who founded the startup Discovery Loop.
On 5 August 2026, Google announced a leadership restructuring at DeepMind: Demis Hassabis, co-founder and head of DeepMind until then, stopped participating in its day-to-day operations. Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously chief technology officer at DeepMind, became the new leader of DeepMind and the remaining co-leader of Gemini model development. According to SemiAnalysis, a number of other senior researchers also left the reinforcement learning teams at DeepMind at the same time.
The same wave of changes includes the departure of Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, who worked at Google for almost 27 years, together with Oriol Vinyals (vice president of research at DeepMind and technical lead for the Gemini model) and Quoc Le (co-founder of the Google Brain initiative and creator of the AutoML-Zero project). The four are founding Discovery Loop as a public benefit corporation, aiming to use AI to automate the scientific process—designing experiments, implementing them and evaluating the results—and to run thousands of such experiments simultaneously. According to TechCrunch, Jeff Dean is expected to serve as CEO.
According to its statement, Google will retain a stake in the new startup and provide it with computing capacity for the first year; Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, said the company would continue working with Discovery Loop as a founding investor and cloud partner. Funding is led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed and Doerr Capital also participating; the exact investment amount was not disclosed. According to its founders, Discovery Loop will first improve its own machine learning algorithms and subsequently focus on fields such as chip design, biology, drug development and materials research.
Why it matters
Two personnel changes at Google are happening concurrently: the departure of a founding generation of researchers (Dean, Ghemawat, Vinyals, Le) to an independent startup and a change at the top of DeepMind. For the industry, this means watching whether Discovery Loop can actually automate scientific experiments autonomously at scale, as the company promises; for Google, it poses a risk of further talent departures from DeepMind, partly offset by a stake in the new startup and its role as the cloud provider for that startup.
What was added since the original report
Verified updates
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Demis Hassabis is stepping away from operations at DeepMind; Koray Kavukcuoglu is becoming the new leader of DeepMind and the remaining co-leader of Gemini; More senior talent in reinforcement learning is leaving DeepMind
- Demis Hassabis is stepping away from operations at DeepMind
- Koray Kavukcuoglu is becoming the new leader of DeepMind and the remaining co-leader of Gemini
- More senior talent in reinforcement learning is leaving DeepMind
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Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are leaving Google after almost 27 years of service; Google will take a stake in the new startup Discovery Loop; Oriol Vinyals is VP of research at DeepMind and technical lead for Gemini; Discovery Loop specifically focuses on an autonomous scientific process: designing, implementing and evaluating experiments; Quoc Le is the founder of the Google Brain initiative and creator of the AutoML-Zero project
- Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are leaving Google after almost 27 years of service
- Google will take a stake in the new startup Discovery Loop
- Oriol Vinyals is VP of research at DeepMind and technical lead for Gemini
- Discovery Loop specifically focuses on an autonomous scientific process: designing, implementing and evaluating experiments
- Quoc Le is the founder of the Google Brain initiative and creator of the AutoML-Zero project
Two audiences, two different impacts
What this means
For individuals
For people in AI/ML, the departure of such a prominent group of researchers confirms that founding independent research startups (known as neolabs) funded by venture capital is now a viable alternative to a career at major laboratories such as DeepMind.
For a business
The leadership restructuring at DeepMind, together with the departure of four key researchers to a newly funded competitor, increases the risk of further talent departures from Google; at the same time, Google is retaining a stake in the new startup and becoming its cloud partner, so it retains some of the value and future research results even after the researchers leave.
People and managementCheck the original
Event sources
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