Jeff Dean, with Google since 1999, will leave the company to join the newly formed AI startup Discovery Loop, along with several top researchers. Co-founders include senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, Google Brain founding member Quoc Le, and DeepMind senior research scientist Oriol Vinyals. Discovery Loop aims to automate research, parallelizing thousands of experiments at the same time. Dean co-created foundational Google innovations such as MapReduce, Bigtable, and TensorFlow, cofounded Google Brain, and helped set up Google Cloud’s core infrastructure including its TPU accelerators. He was among those brought in to build Gemini after the company struggled to answer ChatGPT’s rise with Bard. No leading LLM from Google has reached general availability since 2.5 Pro did in mid-2025, and the last truly competitive model, 3 Pro, launched back in November. Claude Opus, Fable, and GPT-5 variants have led the charge since then, with Chinese open-weight models like GLM 5.2 from Z.ai and Kimi K3 from Moonshot AI surpassing efforts like Gemini 3.6 Flash. Google has also missed a trick in developer environments, with its Gemini CLI now discontinued and Antigravity facing fierce criticism. OpenAI and Anthropic are both working on hardware themselves, while Google experiments with Frozen v2, a chip featuring a model essentially converted into silicon. Hopes are Gemini 4 Pro will change the tide