By Azeem Azhar,Hannah Petrovic
Publication Date: 2026-08-15 04:31:00
Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are leaving Google after more than a quarter-century, as you know. Outside the industry, the pair may not be well-known, but theirs was “the friendship that made Google huge.” Jeff and Sanjay are the reason why billions of us have been able to use Google over the past 20 years. Their work on distributed systems, in particular, is why the search engine could handle decades of growth. “Sanjay and I sped up Google Search by 10% today,” Dean once told his daughter.
They weren’t alone. DeepMind’s founder and Nobel Laureate Demis Hassabis also wanted to leave the company, according to well-grounded reports. He was persuaded to stay in a chair role for the sake of the share price. Koray Kavukcuoglu, an executive more closely associated with product delivery and commercial integration, will run the organization.
Losing your very best talent in a short span, both homegrown in the case of Dean and Ghemawat, and acquired in the case of Hassabis, looks…
