For most people, Google is a search box, Gmail inbox, Android phone or Gemini chatbot. Behind each sits decades of engineering work that almost nobody outside Silicon Valley recognises. On Wednesday, two of the people most responsible for that invisible foundation walked away.Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat have left Google after 27 years to launch Discovery Loop, a startup that wants artificial intelligence to automate scientific research. Joining them are Oriol Vinyals, one of the technical leaders behind Gemini, and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le. Alphabet is backing the venture as a founding investor while also providing cloud infrastructure and collaborating on research, creating the unusual situation of Google supporting a company started by four of the engineers it has just lost.About The AuthorAt heart, I am a storyteller drawn to the watershed moments that bend the technology landscape. I braid narrative with data, humanise statistics, and trace the arc from first spark to world-changing impact. My reportage, features and reviews are witty, sardonic, visual and vivid, using anecdote to illuminate rather than eviscerate.
As a technology journalist with over sixteen years of experience, I have travelled the world and the seven seas, covered every major tech conference worth its lanyard, chronicled the defining breakthroughs of the last decade and a half, and played a pivotal role in launching some of India’s most important technology publishing platforms across web, print and TV.
