Four Google employees—Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals—announced this week they are leaving Google after a combined century or so of employment to start Discovery Loop, a new venture aimed at automating scientific research. Google is investing in the company and providing cloud compute, with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai framing the exits as amicable. A slide in the founders’ introduction deck, titled “Management/Team Building experience,” details their leadership history: Dean co-founded and ran Google Brain at roughly 600 people before leading Google Research and AI teams of about 4,400 people; Vinyals managed teams of up to 250 and built the Gemini pre-training team; Le ran teams of up to 60; Dean and Sanjay were among Google’s first 75 employees; and Dean and Vinyals were founders and co-technical leads of Gemini, with Le running post-training. The slide also lists AI founders who previously worked under these four, including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Chris Olah, and Tom Brown; OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever and Wojciech Zaremba; and xAI’s Igor Babuschkin, Zihang Dai, and Guodong Zhang, mapping much of the modern AI industry’s leadership to their former teams.