Google’s AI godfathers are logging off

TL;DR: Some of Google’s brightest minds in AI have headed for the exits in the last few months—including two big shakeups yesterday. This could all be a symptom of a company that now appears less interested in bleeding-edge AI research, and more in selling Gemini seats.

What happened: Google dropped two bombshells yesterday. The first: Jeff Dean—the firm’s chief scientist and a 27-year company veteran—is leaving to start his own company. And Demis Hassabis, who co-founded the cutting-edge AI lab DeepMind in 2010, is stepping down as CEO to become the division’s chair and Alphabet’s chief scientist, which will mean less day-to-day management.

This latest shakeup caps a brutal few months of departures for Google, including Gemini’s co-lead Noam Shazeer announcing in June that he’s off to OpenAI. Shazeer is co-author of the paper that invented the transformer behind modern LLMs—the “T” in ChatGPT.