Jeff Dean, one of Google’s longest-serving and most influential executives, is leaving the company to found a new artificial intelligence startup. Joining him as co-founders are senior Google researchers Sanjay Ghemawat, a prominent engineer and senior fellow; Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain and key AI researcher; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Reports indicate Dean intends to serve as CEO.
Discovery Loop: mission and approach
The new company, Discovery Loop, has been established as a public benefit corporation and aims to use AI to dramatically accelerate scientific research. According to the company, it plans to deploy high-performance algorithms to launch and iterate thousands of experiments in parallel, partially automating research workflows and expanding the scale at which experiments can be conducted.
Discovery Loop is also interested in using AI to help create more powerful AI — a process often referred to as recursive self-improvement — which could eventually remove human iteration from parts of the development loop altogether.
Funding and supporters
The startup has attracted financing from multiple sources. Its initial funding round is being co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, the company announced. Other participants include Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital, and the venture has also received financial support from Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
Why this matters
Using AI to speed scientific discovery has long been a focus for the science and tech communities, but until recently it remained largely experimental with limited commercial application. Discovery Loop says that by leveraging massive computational scale and advanced AI systems to automate complete experimental loops, it can fundamentally change the speed and efficiency of innovation and deliver transformative technologies to society sooner.
In a joint statement the founding team said, “The next great frontier for AI is to go beyond answering questions and to begin making discoveries.”
Jeff Dean’s background at Google
Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999 and was the company’s 30th employee. Over the years he has contributed to Google Search’s core infrastructure, including its crawling and indexing systems and its query-serving infrastructure. He has also had a significant role in the development of Google Gemini’s multimodal models and was a leading figure in the company’s early AI research.
Speaking to The New York Times, Dean said, “We think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop. You will get both a higher quantity and a higher quality of experiments, and that will lead to scientific breakthroughs and advances.”
