Google’s 30th employee and chief scientist Jeff Dean quits after 27 years to launch startup

Jeff Dean is drawing the curtain on his time at Google — after nearly three decades with the company, the Google Chief Scientist is walking away to launch his own startup. Dean announced on Wednesday that he is leaving Google and will now work on his own AI startup with three other co-founders.Dean’s departure is part of a larger leadership overhaul at Google. Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, is moving to a chairman role at the lab.As part of the shake up, DeepMind's chief technology officer and chief AI architect Koray Kavukcuoglu will become the division's senior vice president and oversee its operations including the development of Google's flagship frontier models and products which are known as Gemini.Jeff Dean’s messageIn an X post announcing his departure, Jeff Dean reflected on how he had seen Google grow from a company with 25 employees to a global giant with over 1.9 lakh employees. He also shared excerpts from the email he sent to his colleagues at Google, writing: “It has been an absolute pleasure to work with you and to help build some of the most widely used and impactful products of all time.” In the same post, he announced that he would launch Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le. Dean described Discovery Loop as a “Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress.”Google will support the startup as a founding investor, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced. “On a personal note, it’s been a privilege to work with Jeff and Sanjay, and I wish them all the best. Thank you for everything!” Pichai added.Dean joined Google in 1999 as the company's 30th employee. During his nearly three decades at the tech giant, he has helped build the core infrastructure behind Google Search, including its crawling, indexing and query-serving systems. More recently, he has played a key role in the development of Google Gemini's multimodal models and has been instrumental in the company's early AI research.Brain drain at GoogleThe leadership changes come amid a wider brain drain at Google. (Also read: Google stock falls 4% as Demis Hassabis steps down in DeepMind leadership shake-up)In June, a top AI and engineering executive, Noam Shazeer, left for OpenAI, while senior researcher John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Hassabis, jumped to Anthropic.Google is competing for customers alongside other major AI developers including Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, as well as DeepSeek and Moonshot in China.(With inputs from AFP)