Google waved off the chief scientist of 27 years, and signed on as a founding investor in the company he is leaving to build

Google rewired the top of its AI organization in one announcement and waved off the chief scientist who had been there for 27 years. Alphabet shares were reported trading around 4 percent lower on the day, in the $360s.

Alphabet Stock (GOOGL) Drops After Longtime Google AI Leaders Depart (TipRanks, 2026-08-05)

출처: tipranks.com

Who moved, who left

Demis Hassabis steps down as CEO of Google DeepMind and becomes Chair of the lab and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. He keeps running Isomorphic Labs, the drug design company. The seat where models actually get built goes to Koray Kavukcuoglu. As SVP of Google DeepMind he takes Gemini model development, frontier research, and the Gemini app and developer teams, reporting straight to Pichai. He has been at DeepMind for 13 years, and WaveNet, the speech synthesis system, and the DQN reinforcement learning model came out of his work.

Demis Hassabis drops DeepMind CEO role to become Chair and focus on AGI (9to5Google, 2026-08-05)

출처: 9to5google.com

Jeff Dean is leaving Google after 27 years. He is starting a company with Sanjay Ghemawat, who joined in 1999 alongside him and has worked with him for more than 25 years. Between them they built MapReduce, the Google File System, Bigtable, Spanner and TensorFlow. The floor Google now stands on to process data and train models came out of their hands. Oriol Vinyals, a Gemini co-lead, and Quoc Le, a co-founder of Google Brain, are reported to be joining them.

Google is funding the company it is losing them to

The new firm is said to be a public benefit corporation. That is a Delaware company form that must pursue a public purpose written into its charter alongside shareholder returns, and must report publicly on how that purpose is going. Put simply, it is a for profit company that nails down in its charter what the profit is for. Anthropic and Patagonia use the same structure. Google is going in as a founding investor and supplying cloud capacity for the first year. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are reported to have invested alongside it, and the terms were not disclosed. Reports name the company Discovery Loop. Pichai's own post does not name it.

Not one day, but a year of this

The number Alphabet shows in October

In the same announcement Pichai said the Gemini app had passed 950 million monthly users and Gemma model downloads had passed 900 million. The people changed; the spending did not. At July's second quarter results Alphabet raised its capital spending plan for the year to between $195 billion and $205 billion. What an owner of this stock has reason to ask about is not the nameplate on the door but the pace at which models ship. If development does not slip as researchers leave, this reads as a generational handover; if the capital spending plan steps back at the October results, it reads differently. Google taking an investor's seat in its own people's new company gets re read at that point too. Either it bought with equity what it could not keep on payroll, or it decided that people may leave while the connection does not.