Person
Jeff Dean
Lately: Discovery Loop as Co-Founder, from Google.
Recorded moves, newest first
Jeff Dean to Discovery Loop as Co-Founder
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 gave up her post as OpenAI's second-in-command to illness, Jeff Dean left Google with three senior colleagues to found a rival, and John Ternus took over at Apple, redrawing AI's leadership 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, and the same pay war running through Big Tech now reaches 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.
Hiring & Talent
The Signal Brief: Forty Founders and a Frontier Kill Switch
Google DeepMind's own alumni have founded more startups than OpenAI, Anthropic or Meta, Gavin Newsom ordered frontier labs toward a kill switch, and Microsoft's stock jumped on a Copilot that finally writes code.
Hiring & Talent
Forty Founders: How DeepMind Built the Rival It Fears
Google DeepMind has produced more startup founders than any rival lab, and four of the newest ventures are raising billions to prospect for the technology that replaces the transformer it still sells.
Hiring & Talent
DeepMind's Founding Generation Leaves to Build Rivals
Nine senior Google DeepMind and Google Brain scientists left in 2026 to found or join four separate rivals, and Google says its bench stays deep.