AI Research Talent Exodus and Automated Science Push

Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, Oriol Vinyals leave Google to launch Discovery Loop for AI-accelerated scientific discovery; Alphabet participates. Demis Hassabis steps down as DeepMind CEO, becomes Alphabet chief scientist; Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over. Four other top Google AI researchers form separate startup. Mirendil (ex-Anthropic founders, $1B seed) inks $100M+ Google Cloud deal for self-improving AI to automate science. Signals shift from Big Tech labs to startups for frontier research.