San Francisco - Alphabet’s Google is losing some of its most prominent artificial intelligence veterans in a seismic overhaul that is casting doubt over leadership of a critical area of growth right as competition intensifies.

Jeff Dean, a longtime Google employee central to the development of the company’s AI strategy, is departing to launch a start-up, taking several high-profile colleagues with him. Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, is moving into a chairman role at the lab.

In the new structure, Hassabis will assume the dual titles of chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. He is handing over operational control of the lab to Koray Kavukcuoglu, a longtime deputy, who has been promoted to senior vice president of Google DeepMind and will report to Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai, the company announced on Aug 5 in a blog post.

For Google, staying at the forefront of the AI race is existential. The rapid advances in generative AI are introducing new ways for consumers to get answers to their questions, presenting real alternatives to Google search and potentially undercutting the company’s advertising business. 

The right talent is considered essential to succeeding in the AI race. Only a select few engineers in the world have extensive experience building complex, broad AI models. Historically, Google employed a bulk of them. The changes in leadership may make it harder for Google to recruit top talent and compete with rival labs.

Dean is bringing along at least three other prominent DeepMind employees to his new venture, including Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals. The start-up, called Discovery Loop, will automate machine learning research to improve its own technology. Google provided investment funding for Discovery Loop and signed a deal to supply the startup with cloud computing resources.

Google had already lost two prominent staffers earlier in 2026 when Nobel laureate John Jumper left to Anthropic and star researcher Noam Shazeer went to OpenAI. One staff member characterised the latest departures of veteran staff as an earthquake for the organisation.