Jeff Dean, Google's 30th employee and Chief Scientist, has departed after a 27-year tenure to co-found Discovery Loop, an automated scientific research company, with three other scientists, according to Wall Street Journal. The three accompanying scientists are Oriol Vinyals, a key contributor to AlphaFold, which was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; Quoc Le, who co-led an AI system achieving gold-medal-level performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad; and Sanjay Ghemawat, who co-built Google's early distributed systems infrastructure with Dean. Prominent investor Bill Gurley rebutted the market's 'game over' narrative on X, stating Google must 'draw lessons from the Android/Kubernetes playbook and fully embrace open-source models.' CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's Head of Technology, will assume day-to-day operations and lead Gemini 4 development, while former head Demis Hassabis transitions to Chairman of DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. Following Wednesday's announcement, Google's stock plunged 4% that day and fell further by over 1% on Thursday. Discovery Loop aims to automate complex, multi-step experimental workflows through machine learning models; Dean stated the scientific process is 'entirely computable.' Alphabet will provide cloud computing resources and participate in the investment, with Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures co-leading the seed round. Ghemawat noted Google's existing infrastructure is '