DeepMind scientists consider founding AI startup, reportedly resign from Google

This won't be the first time that Google employees leave the company to form an AI startup. (Representational photo by Google DeepMind via Pexels)

Two scientists from Google's DeepMind are reportedly courting investors for an AI startup headquartered in Paris. Bloomberg, who cited sources familiar with the matter, reported that Laurent Sifre and Karl Tuyls from DeepMind had engaged in conversations with potential investors for a financing round possibly exceeding $220 million.

Laurent Sifre is the co-author of research papers on the groundbreaking AlphaGo, a neural AI model that has been taught to play the board game Go, even beating the number one ranked player in 2017, following which the model was retired.

Karl Tuyls is well known for his work and research on game theory and reinforcement learning for AI models. Both scientists have supposedly submitted their resignations, although Google has not confirmed their departure officially yet.

This won't be the first time that Google employees leave the company to form an AI startup. Most famously, OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT and GPT, are made up of a lot of ex-Google employees.

Speaking with Bloomberg in June 2023, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, "Googlers have left to create over 2,000 startups, last I counted, and I think that’s great. Some of them are cloud customers down the line for us. Some of them come back. I think it’s healthy."