Google is in discussions for a deal valued at over $1.5 billion to non-exclusively license technology from San Francisco-based AI coding startup Mechanize and bring over key personnel to strengthen its AI evaluation and model development capabilities, as reported by Business Insider. This comes as Chief Scientist Jeff Dean is stepping down after 27 years to serve as CEO of a new public-benefit venture, Discovery Loop, alongside Google veterans Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, and Sanjay Ghemawat. Dean, who joined as Google's 30th employee in 1999 and played a pivotal role in creating Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and leading Google Brain, aims to build software and model stacks that fully automate the experimental scientific loop. The team plans to focus initially on automated machine-learning research before expanding into hardware engineering, clean energy, and automated drug discovery. Ghemawat noted the team chose to strike out independently because Google's existing technical setup presents different constraints than the nimble infrastructure required for groundbreaking automated research. Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) stock dropped nearly 4% on Wednesday to record its largest single-day drop in two weeks. The departure highlights a broader trend of prominent AI researchers leaving Google, including Noam Shazeer for OpenAI, John Jumper for Anthropic, and senior Gemini model developers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel.