Jeff Dean leaves Google after 27 years to automate the scientific method

Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist and the engineer behind much of the infrastructure the modern web runs on, is leaving the company after almost 27 years. The departure was announced on 5 August 2026 alongside a wider reshuffle of Google's AI leadership, in which Koray Kavukcuoglu was promoted to senior vice-president leading Google DeepMind. Dean is not leaving alone. He co-founds Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat, the Google Senior Fellow who built much of that infrastructure with him; Oriol Vinyals, a vice-president of research at Google DeepMind and technical lead on Gemini; and Quoc Le, a co-founder of Google Brain. It is difficult to name four departures that would cut deeper into one company's research bench. Discovery Loop is set up as an independent public benefit corporation and aims to use AI to automate scientific and engineering research. Its declared starting point is deliberately recursive: autonomous experiment loops whose first subject is the machine-learning algorithms the company itself depends on — a system that runs experiments to improve the thing running the experiments. Google's response is unusual for a departure of this size. Rather than treating it as a loss, the company is a founding investor, will act as the startup's cloud partner, is supplying compute for its first year and plans to collaborate on a shared research framework for ML systems and infrastructure.