Vector Lab
VECTOR LAB

EST. 2025

WEEKLY UPDATE2026
BY ANDREW MEAD

Google is Falling Apart

Google loses more of its top talent

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News

Google loses their key players

We have talked multiple times now about Google’s LLM program, starting with the poor performance of Gemini 3.5 and 3.6 Flash, and then departure of top names like Noam Shazeer and John Jumper.

That list of notable departures has grown now, adding the head of DeepMind Demis Hassabis and Google OG Jeff Dean.

Demis has led DeepMind from its inception, being at the helm for AlphaGo, AlphaFold (which he won a Nobel prize for), and all of the Gemini models. He is not technically leaving the company, instead moving to be work for Isomorphic, an internal Google startup focused on curing disease.

It is reported that he actually wanted to leave the company along with Jeff Dean, but Google convinced him not to because they feared it would cause their stock price to crash (the departure of Jeff Dean alone cause it to drop $200 billion).

For those that don’t know Jeff Dean, the fact that his departure caused Google stock to lose $200 billion dollars is a good intro for how important and influential of an engineer he is.

He was employee number 30 at the company, and was one of the main creators of Google’s core infrastructure early on (along with Sanjay Ghemawat, who is also leaving with him), which allowed Google to scale into the behemoth they are today. He also created MapReduce, BigTable, and TensorFlow, along with being one of the co-founders of Google Brain, where he became one of the first big names in the AI space.

Because of this he has legendary status in the Computer Science world, with his legend being akin to Chuck Norris, with many myths surrounding his work.

Jeff Dean facts

Some fun (mostly fake) Jeff Dean facts from GitHub

He is departing Google with Sanjay to make a new startup called Discovery Loop to “automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress”.

Demis, Jeff, and Sanjay are probably the 3 biggest names in Google history (outside of the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin), who were probably getting paid whatever they asked for (as we saw, Jeff Dean alone was worth $200 billion according to the markets), so their departures signal a sinking ship within Google that is unrepairable. Everyone thought that Google had become too big and bureaucratic, with deep cultural rot, and that would cause them to keep up with the AI race. It took a few more years than expected, but that vision has become true.

If you are using any of the Gemini models, I would recommend moving away from them, and not getting too comfortable in their ecosystem, as I don’t think it has any long term value. I personally do not see Google recovering from this any time soon, and consider them a lab in decline, and will not be covering their LLMs for the foreseeable future.

Finish

It was a quiet week for the news, so there’s nothing else that you need to know. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to get the news every week, be sure to join our mailing list below.

Sometimes I dream of being a bird by YUDHO on Twitter

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