Several of Google’s top artificial intelligence researchers, led by Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google’s AI lab DeepMind and employee number 30 since 1999, held a secret meeting with a prominent venture capitalist in Mountain View, California earlier this summer. Last Wednesday, Dean, along with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, who served more than 80 years at Google between them, announced their departure to found Discovery Loop, a startup automating the scientific method for drug discovery and chip design. Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s chief executive, said he would step back to a chair role. Alphabet’s share price fell 5%. Sources say the reorganisation aims to produce a frontier model in Gemini to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic. The shake-up recentralises power to Silicon Valley, with co-founder Sergey Brin reportedly taking a more active role and Koray Kavukcuoglu promoted to lead Gemini development. According to Zeki Data, 74 researchers have left Google DeepMind so far this year, a rate of 1.7 arrivals per departure, down from 2.6 in 2025 and 4.7 in 2024. Rates for Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic were 0.7, 5.4 and 8.3 respectively. Tom Hurd of Zeki called the lab “in rude health” but noted an “exceptional amount” of high-profile depart