Yet another member of Google’s artificial intelligence team has announced his exit from the company after two senior AI researchers left the tech giant within the same week to join Google’s top rivals. Unlike the previous walkouts this month, Matthieu “Matt” Lorrain, who has been with Google for the past 18 years, didn’t mention crossing over to any other AI company. His farewell post, shared on LinkedIn, instead focused on nostalgia, as the Google DeepMind creative lead looked back at his personal and professional growth in the last two decades.

Google DeepMind employee quits and pens farewell note

“I resigned from Google DeepMind,” Matthieu Lorrain, who worked for over two years as a creative lead at the AI research lab, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. Prior to his DeepMind role, the man named on Business Insider’s ‘AI Power List 2024’ held multiple creative positions at Google’s New York City Metropolitan Area office.

“After 18 years at Google and the most unexpected journey… I joined the team in Paris, when YouTube was three years old. I left in New York, inventing the future of AI creativity with Hollywood legends,” he continued on LinkedIn.

“In between, so many lives: Building the early playbook for creativity on YouTube. Joining a crew of creative misfits in NYC, pioneering the creator economy before it had a name. Designing worlds with Gorillaz, Stranger Things, Baby Yoda, and the NBA. Helping launch Veo. Painting Manhattan with 4,000 screens. Executive producing a film with Darren Aronofsky.”

Describing the adventurous journey as “frankly absurd,” Lorrain maintained that he was grateful for every chapter.

Mapping out a full arc from his past to the industry’s forthcoming future, the former Google employee said his contributions included helping develop “tools taught machines to dream.” He went on to note, “The next chapter isn’t about automated outputs. It’s about who get to shape our culture.”

And so, he’s onto the next chapter, joining creatives and technologists who believe in human imagination.

“The work has a name: Liquid Content,” he added. “A new medium, storytelling that adapts, anchored in authorship. A new humanism for the age of machines. The future is liquid.”

Ex-Google executive’s next focus: Liquid Content

Last year, an International News Media Association report suggested that liquid content, as a concept, has been around for nearly a decade, citing Mika Rahkonen, the head of strategy at Yle, the Finnish broadcasting company. However, Rahkonen believes that the term was formally coined by the former Google executive Matthieu Lorrain.

At its core, Liquid Content refers to stories that can adapt in format, length, structure and more depending on who is consuming, and in what context.

Explaining what the term means and its link to AI, Lorrain once wrote on social media, “From the dawn of humankind, stories were oral, flexible, and alive—shaped by the listener and the moment. The rise of media made stories easier to share across time and space, but it came at a cost: rigidity. Stories became locked into fixed formats.”

“Today, with generative AI, we’re entering a new era: content is becoming dynamic again, flowing like water to adapt to you—your time, space, and interactions.”

“This is Liquid Content: storytelling that shifts and evolves across dimensions like time, space, interactivity, and even style. Imagine a movie that changes its tone depending on where you watch it or a story that adapts its length based on your schedule.”

Back in 2024, Matt Lorrain, serving as the Global Head of Creative Innovation at Google at the time, delved into the concept of “Liquid Content” on an episode of ‘Brand Bots,’ an AI marketing podcast, highlighting the value of “customisation” of content.

Even at that time, Lorrain was working closely with Google’s R&D and product team to cultivate early use cases of creative experience with Google’s latest creative tech (genAI, XR, 3D, Google Lens), cementing his position as a leading figure at the intersection of emerging tech and storytelling.

Recent top Google AI talent walkouts

Lorrain’s Google DeepMind exit comes in the same month as the departures of Gemini’s co-lead, Noam Shazeer, and Nobel Prize-winning co-creator of AlphaFold, John Jumper.

The tech giant lost the high-profile researcher duo to AI rivals OpenAI and Anthropic in a week, respectively. Notably, both companies have the advantage of forthcoming IPOs on the financial front. The recent SpaceX Nasdaq debut goes to show how a Wall Street debut can work wonders not only for top leadership but also for other employees, who turned into millionaires overnight.

Shazeer, who was also a VP of Engineering at Google and is the co-founder of Character.AI, quitting the Sundar Pichai-led firm especially became a buzzworthy point of discussion since the company paid more than $2 billion to bring back Shazeer to Google and part of his Character.AI team.

Merely two days after he quit, John Jumper said he was leaving Google DeepMind for Anthropic.

These departures, in turn, succeed that of Rene Mayrhofer, who was Google’s Director of Android Platform Security and joined the company nine years ago. In an official resignation letter published on his personal blog, the tech leader confirmed that his reason to leave Google was also linked to AI. Specifically targeting the company’s controversial Pentagon AI deal, Mayrhofer wrote that he was “forced to say farewell” because Google’s management “has lost its moral compass.”

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