MOUNTAIN VIEW — Legendary computer scientist Sanjay Ghemawat has exited Google after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop, an AI-driven venture focused on automating complex scientific and engineering research.
Ghemawat—who joined Google in 1999 and co-architected foundational systems including MapReduce, Bigtable, Spanner, and the Google File System alongside Jeff Dean—leaves as a Senior Fellow in Google’s Systems Infrastructure Group.
Discovery Loop, established as a Public Benefit Corporation, is co-founded with Dean, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. Backed by venture firms including Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Lightspeed, the new startup has secured Alphabet as a founding investor and strategic cloud partner.
Leadership Reshuffle at Google DeepMind
Ghemawat’s departure coincides with a major executive restructuring at Google DeepMind:
-
Demis Hassabis Shifts Roles: Hassabis is stepping down from day-to-day operations to become Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs.
-
New DeepMind Leadership: Koray Kavukcuoglu steps up as Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind to oversee daily operations.
-
Alphabet Commitment: Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai reaffirmed Google’s ongoing partnership with Discovery Loop, framing the transition as a passing of the torch to a new generation of technical leaders at the AI frontier.
