Google's AI Brain Trust Pulls a Rolling Stones, Starts New Band

Google announced the departures of Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat — its only two Senior Fellows, with a combined 50+ years at the company — alongside DeepMind VP Oriol Vinyals and Google Brain cofounder Quoc Le, all leaving to form a recursive self-improvement startup. On the same day, Demis Hassabis stepped back from day-to-day DeepMind operations into an Alphabet Chief Scientist role, with Koray Kavukcuoglu continuing as Chief AI Architect reporting directly to Pichai. Combined with prior exits (Shazeer to OpenAI, Jumper to Anthropic, Norvig to Recursive Superintelligence), it resembles an unprecedented brain drain, though operationally the consolidation of DeepMind under Google's broader AI efforts may actually help cut through internal bureaucracy.