Person
Jeff Dean
Lately: Discovery Loop as Co-Founder, from Google.
Recorded moves
Jeff Dean → Discovery Loop as Co-Founder, from Google (Chief Scientist)
The largest single-company senior-researcher departure verified in 2026, and the clearest sign a hyperscaler will bankroll a rival to keep its former chief scientist close.
In the archive
Hiring & Talent
The Biggest AI Hires of 2026 (So Far)
Fidji Simo relinquished her post as OpenAI's second-in-command to illness, Noam Shazeer and three Google veterans departed together to found a rival, and John Ternus rose to Apple's helm, rewriting AI's leadership map in 2026.
Hiring & Talent
Google DeepMind's Retention Playbook
A $2.4 billion Windsurf acquihire, Koray Kavukcuoglu's promotion and Demis Hassabis's step-back from chief executive trace how Google answered an exodus that sent Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer toward rivals.
Hiring & Talent
The Founder-Scientist Labs
Mira Murati's Thinking Machines, Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence and a cluster of scientist-led startups command double-digit-billion valuations before shipping a product, yet the same compensation war rattling Big Tech now shakes their founding teams too.
Frontier Models
Gemini's Momentum
Gemini 3 Pro's November 2025 launch and a Search overhaul unveiled at Google I/O 2026 built the product momentum Demis Hassabis's research organization needed, even as Jeff Dean led three senior colleagues out the door to found a rival science venture.
Research
World Models and the Next Paradigm
Yann LeCun quit Meta and raised $1.03 billion for AMI Labs, Fei-Fei Li shipped Marble, and four Google veterans launched Discovery Loop, together signaling that the field's next scaling bet runs through physical understanding, a wager bigger than another round of chatbot scaling.