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Monday, September 14, 2026
AI Lately

AI is about people, and what they have been up to lately.

Person

Jeff Dean

Lately: Discovery Loop as Co-Founder, from Google.

Public record only: name, role, employer, source, and date.

Recorded moves

  1. Jeff DeanDiscovery 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.

    foundingreportedGeekWire: The Startup Idea That Convinced a UW Computer Science Legend to Leave Google After 27 YearsAug 5, 2026

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.