Someone who left DeepMind over Google's agreement to provide military AI to the US government tried to get Jeff Dean to quit too:
https://turntrout.com/why-i-left-google-deepmind
Maybe this is what happens when someone with Jeff Dean's standing tries to quit?
TBH, I'd rather have Jeff Dean working on the creepiest-possible tech for ICE than joining the race to automate AI research. Automating AI research is terrifying.
If you check out some sub-tweets from people in the org, it wasn't really all butterflies internally for a while. Sorry, really don't want to name people and give examples.