Six of eight walked out
in ten weeks.

One: the CEO post was dissolved rather than refilled.

Koray Kavukcuoglu moved up from chief technology officer to run Google DeepMind day to day. He reports directly to Sundar Pichai and owns Gemini models, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams. His title is senior vice president, and nobody got the chief executive title. A CEO runs a company that reports to a board; an SVP runs a division that reports to a CEO. DeepMind spent a decade as a semi-autonomous lab bolted onto Google. On 5 August that ended.

Two: the Chief Scientist title moved rather than vanished.

Jeff Dean held it at Google. He walked out, and on the same day Hassabis was handed a newly created Alphabet-level version of the same title. Read the two announcements together and the choreography is clear: the organisation lost the person the title described and kept the title.

Alphabet converted these four from employees into a portfolio position.

Three: the money went out the door with them.

Discovery Loop’s seed round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla, with Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, Doerr Capital and Alphabet. Google Cloud is a partner. So the compute the four will use to automate ML research is rented from the company they just left, and paid for in part with that company’s own money. A company that could not keep four people inside the building has bought optionality on them outside it. Of every fact in the reporting, that is the most informative.

Four: the June departures reframe the August one.

Noam Shazeer went to OpenAI on 17 June, under two years after Google reportedly paid about $2.7 billion to bring him back from Character.AI. John Jumper, who shares a Nobel with Hassabis for AlphaFold, went to Anthropic two days later. Taken alone, 5 August looks like a reorganisation. Placed after those two, it looks like the end of a ten-week run. In those weeks Google’s AI organisation lost its Gemini co-lead, its most decorated scientist, its chief scientist, and three more of its founding research figures, while its flagship model stayed unreleased past a June target.

The caveat

Eight people is the set the reporting names. Google’s AI staff numbers in the thousands, and eight is no census of it. “Six of eight” describes the named principals in one news cycle. It is not a retention rate, and reading it as one would be a chart crime. It does measure how concentrated the loss was at the top, which is what markets reacted to.