The Architects Leave the Building: Hassabis Steps Back, Jeff Dean Exits After 27 Years, and Google Funds the Startup Automating Science - August 10, 2026

The Architects Leave the Building: Hassabis Steps Back, Jeff Dean Exits After 27 Years, and Google Funds the Startup Automating Science On August 5, Sundar Pichai told Google DeepMind teams that Demis Hassabis is becoming Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, handing day to day leadership to Koray Kavukcuoglu. Buried in the same memo: after what Pichai called an incredible 27 year run, Jeff Dean is leaving Google, joined by Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Gemini co lead Oriol Vinyals, to found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation built to automate the experimental loop of science itself. Google is staying on as a founding investor and cloud partner. Chris and Laura work through what it means that four of the people who built the modern AI stack have concluded the real bottleneck is no longer the model, but the rate at which experiments can be run. Hosted by Chris and Laura. The DX Today Podcast brings you daily deep dives into the most consequential stories in the AI ecosystem. #AI #GoogleDeepMind #JeffDean #DemisHassabis #AIResearch