• by Laurie Sullivan , 4 hours ago

An executive shakeup across Google's parent company Alphabet was announced Wednesday amid restructuring of the company's artificial intelligence (AI) divisions as competition heats up.

DeepMind Chief scientist Jeff Dean and several Google AI colleagues are leaving to start their own company, Discover Loop -- an independent publicity benefit corporation Google will invest in and become the cloud provider. Joining him in are Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, and Oriol Vinyals, a DeepMind vice president, and Quoc Le, a Google Brain co-founder.

The post describes Dean's and Ghemawat's transition to launch the independent corporation to accelerate discoveries in machine learning, science, and engineering.

Pichai noted how Dean and Ghemawat "helped to drive some of the most significant technology transitions, from our early search infrastructure to the neural networks that helped create the modern AI era."

The post regarding this organizational update, Next Chapter of Our AI Momentum, was published Wednesday and co-authored by Pichai and Hassabis.

In an interview with The New York Times, Dean said that leaving Google, a public company, gives him more autonomy to focus on scientific discoveries associated with AI.

"We might make decisions that are not necessarily in the company's purist financial interests," he told NYT.

Demis Hassabis will leave his role as Google DeepMind CEO to become the units Chairman and newly appointed chief scientist of Alphabet, Google's parent company, as well as continue to lead Isomorphic Labs, an AI drug discover company.

Hassabis will remain closely connected to Koray Kavukcuoglu, CTO of Google DeepMind, and chief AI architect, will step into the role of senior vice president of Google DeepMind, reporting to Sundar Pichai, Google and Alphabet CEO.

Kavukcuoglu will oversee Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams. He has been at DeepMind for about 13 years. He started Google's deep learning team and led breakthroughs like WaveNet, a generative raw AI model for audio, and DQN, a learning algorithm.