Why Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean Is Leaving To Launch An AI Startup With Indian-American Tech Veteran

In one of the most significant departures in Silicon Valley history, Jeff Dean, the Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, has announced his resignation after 27 years with the search giant. Dean joined Google in 1999 as its 30th employee, witnessing the company grow from a 25-person team in a small office to a global tech giant employing over 190,000 people. During his tenure, he helped build many of Google's foundational computing systems and later played a leading role in AI research, including work on Google Brain and Gemini..

Instead of retiring, Dean is teaming up with his long-time software collaborator, Indian-origin tech veteran Sanjay Ghemawat, alongside top AI researchers Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, to launch a new venture named Discovery Loop.

Ghemawat, a Google Senior Fellow, worked alongside Dean for nearly three decades. Together, the duo co-created foundational distributed systems such as MapReduce and Bigtable, which helped lay the technical groundwork for modern computing and big data processing. Their reunion on a new project has drawn widespread interest across the technology industry.

Organised as a public benefit corporation, Discovery Loop aims to use artificial intelligence to automate experimental workflows in science and engineering. According to WIRED, the founders aim to develop AI systems capable of proposing, conducting and evaluating thousands of experiments simultaneously.

In a farewell message shared with colleagues and posted on X, Dean reflected warmly on his career at the company, expressing gratitude for the products that now serve billions of users every day.

Tomorrow will be my last day at Google after 27 years, and watching it grow from 25 people to 190,000+ has been an amazing journey. Below is a note I shared with many people internally at Google today. An excerpt is:

It has been an absolute pleasure to work with you and to help… pic.twitter.com/o3aRNLkssA

— Jeff Dean (@JeffDean) August 5, 2026

He noted that his dream as a child was to help build software that millions would use, adding that Google now operates thirteen products with over a billion active users.

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…

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) August 5, 2026

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai publicly thanked Dean for his decades of service, confirming that Google will act as a supporting investor and cloud computing partner for Discovery Loop.