Google's Top AI Researchers Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat Leave to Start New Research Startup

Google’s only two senior fellows who were leading the company’s AI research have quit. Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, who focussed on artificial intelligence advances for Google DeepMind and Google Research, and his close collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat, Senior Fellow in Google’s Systems Infrastructure Group, announced their departure from the tech giant on Wednesday. After dedicating 27 years to the company, the duo is parting ways with Google to start their own research AI startup called Discovery Loop. Quoc Le, a key AI researcher and founding member of Google Brain, and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind, are also joining them as the first members of the public benefit corporation, which many are already predicting could become as big as Google in the future. All four are leaving on friendly terms and will, in a way, retain their ties with the company. CEO Sundar Pichai has already confirmed that the tech giant’s parent company, Alphabet, will serve as founding investor and Cloud partner for their startup in addition to collaborating on some future research initiatives. Nonetheless, the departure of Google’s top four AI researchers prompted a major reshuffling, with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis moving into a chairman role and taking on the role of Alphabet’s Chief Scientist while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs. Moreover, DeepMind technology chief Koray Kavukcuoglu is being promoted to the AI division’s SVP. While the pair decided to leave behind a company they both joined 27 years ago, their friendship will continue crafting a new era of AI elsewhere. Dean and Ghemawat aim to “accelerate discoveries” in machine learning, science and engineering as they start their own research AI startup called Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation seeking to use AI to bring big change to scientific research. In addition to Alphabet backing the new company, Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, among several other Silicon Valley investors, will contribute to its seed funding. “After an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that. Jeff and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering,” wrote the Google CEO, according to the company’s latest blog post. “Jeff and Sanjay 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. On a personal note, it’s been a privilege to work alongside Jeff and Sanjay, and I wish them all the best! We’ll continue to work with them as a founding investor and Cloud partner, and collaborate on a research framework for ML systems and related infrastructure advances.” Just shared some changes we’re making to the teams at @GoogleDeepMind . @DemisHassabis is stepping up to become Chair of @GoogleDeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet, in addition to leading @IsomorphicLabs . He’ll be able to dedicate his time and focus on shaping the future of… Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat have been attached to the tech giant since the mid- or late 1990s. While the company has already allowed them to continue their partnership in the tech world for over 27 years, their friendship goes back even further. The longtime friends are the first and only bearers of the elite title ‘Google Senior Fellow,’ the company’s highest technical rank. Reserved for a small group of individuals, it puts the iconic duo at ‘Level 11’ in the company. Given their exceptionally profound contributions, the title-holders were equivalent to a Senior Vice President, according to numerous tech blogs. Although Dean and Ghemawat haven’t received the same mainstream levels of coverage as Larry Page and Sergey Brin, all decade-old headlines revolving around them have always pictured them as an unbreakable unit that changed Google and the modern internet forever. “The Friendship That Made Google Huge,” The New Yorker titled a joint profile of the pair in 2018, describing the company’s top coders as “two halves of a single mind.” In the 1990s, camaraderie started taking shape between the two at a gelato stand between their respective labs at what was once one of the largest computer makers in the world, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), until it suffered a financial downfall. Despite growing up worlds apart in Hawaii and India, respectively, Jeff and Sanjay started at the now-defunct firm within about a year of each other and eventually joined forces on a project to build a low-overhead profiling system, according to a years-old interview with the Communications of the ACM. While they shared an office for most of their time at Google, DEC laid the foundation for their productive friendship, allowing them to even code together. Most friendships yearn to reach a point where the two halves of the affectionate relationship can finish each other’s sentences. Jeff and Sanjay could even understand “where the other one is going with an idea” long before that, as per their joint interview with Communications of the ACM. “When I work with Sanjay, the code we write together is better than anything either one of us could write alone,” Jeff once said, as quoted by Tech Unmasked. I also want to give a huge thanks to the incomparable @JeffDean after an incredible 27-year run at Google. He’s off to start his own public benefit corporation with @Sanjay_Ghemawat focused on accelerating discoveries across ML, science, & engineering. @Google will support as a… Ultimately, that synergy transcended companies and tech hierarchies, helping them put their minds together to aid Google with scalability years later. MapReduce emerged as one of their best-known projects, as it enabled programmers to spread computations across multiple machines. Subsequently, they laid the groundwork for other consequential software in Internet history: BigTable, TensorFlow, and the Google File System. But before all those landmark achievements, a March 2000 nearly brought about the disastrous end to Google’s legacy shortly after Page and Brin founded it in 1998. At the time, the co-founders were negotiating a search engine deal with Yahoo. According to The New Yorker, they had promised to deliver an index ten times bigger than they had at the time. As expected, the stakes were higher than ever. Nothing appeared to go in their favour, as a bunch of Google’s first employees put their computers together to figure out the impossible, while the company continued to face hardware failures for months on end. Ultimately, Jeff and Sanjay, who often coded using the same computer, wrote the code to counter it all. According to The New Yorker, they worked ninety-hour weeks to put together a code so that a single hard drive could fail without bringing the system down. Forging the paths between software and hardware, the duo worked as a unit to prove that Google’s index could be stored using fast random-access memory instead of hard drives.