Alphabet shares fell 4% on Wednesday on what the company would like you to read as a routine executive transition: Demis Hassabis up to chairman of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet, Koray Kavukcuoglu taking day-to-day control, and Jeff Dean off to found a startup — with…
ogle’s blessing and Google’s money. That’s the press-release version
The market read it completely differently. Start with what actually walked out the door. It wasn’t two people, as Sundar Pichai’s memo implied.
Discovery Loop’s own website lists four founders: Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le. Vinyals and Dean were Gemini’s co-technical leads. So on the day Google introduced the executive responsible for shipping Gemini 4, both of the model’s technical leads resigned.