Google DeepMind’s Gemini Developer Joins Elon Musk’s xAI

Dustin Tran, a Senior Researcher at Google DeepMind and a core developer of the Gemini project, has announced his departure after eight years to join Elon Musk’s xAI team, where he will help develop the next generation of Grok models. The move was first revealed by Tran on social media and later amplified by Musk, who reposted the announcement.

During his time at Google DeepMind, Tran contributed to the Gemini series and recalled how public perception shifted in favour of Google’s AI prospects as Gemini gained momentum. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and statistics from the University of California, Berkeley (2014), along with PhDs in statistics from Harvard University and in computer science from Columbia University, and his scholarly work has been cited more than 24,000 times.

Tran emphasised that xAI’s Colossus 2 supercomputing platform provides the ideal environment for advancing language models, and he believes infrastructure and data scale will increasingly shape AI development, with xAI competing alongside Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. according to Daily CyberSecurity. 23 September 2025