Alphabet (GOOGL) shares fell to a session low, dropping 5.4%, after reports emerged of a sweeping executive shakeup and a string of high-profile talent departures.
Jeff Dean, one of Google’s earliest employees and a chief architect of its artificial intelligence strategy for 15 years, is leaving to launch an AI startup focused on scientific discovery.
Joining Dean as co-founders are fellow Google AI veterans Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, and Sanjay Ghemawat, forming one of the most consequential departures in the company’s history.
The new venture, a public-benefit corporation named Discovery Loop, aims to accelerate technological breakthroughs by fully automating complex, multistep science and engineering experiments.
Discovery Loop will initially build an internal technology stack to automate machine learning research before expanding into hardware design, drug discovery, and clean energy.
Dean spent 27 years at Google and helped build Google Brain, the company’s early deep-learning team, and also led development of its tensor processing units.
Alphabet is backing Discovery Loop as a founding investor and cloud computing partner, alongside seed round co-leads Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures.
CEO Sundar Pichai commended Dean and Ghemawat for driving key technological shifts over their 27-year tenure, from early search infrastructure and TPUs to modern deep-learning neural networks.
Separately, Google DeepMind is facing its own leadership reshuffle, with CEO Demis Hassabis stepping down to become Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet.
Hassabis will continue leading Isomorphic Labs and advising on models and research from DeepMind’s London office, maintaining significant influence over the company’s scientific direction.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s CTO and Google’s Chief AI Architect, will take over as Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind, reporting directly to Sundar Pichai.
Kavukcuoglu, who has been with DeepMind for 13 years, will lead Gemini model work, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams going forward.
The timing of the departures is particularly sensitive, as the flagship version of Google’s latest Gemini model still has not shipped after a planned June launch.
Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI in June, and Nobel laureate John Jumper joined Anthropic the same week, signaling an accelerating exodus of elite AI talent from Google.
Despite the stock decline, analysts maintain a Strong Buy rating on GOOGL shares, with full-year 2026 revenue projected to reach $497.7 billion, supported by strong growth in ad revenues and cloud contracts.
Shares currently trade at a trailing price-to-earnings ratio of approximately 17.8x, near historic lows for the company, largely driven by market anxiety over elevated capital expenditure levels.
