Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean Launches AI Startup Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean, the chief scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research, has left Google after nearly 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop. He is joined by senior AI scientists Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, all of whom held critical leadership roles including co-founding Google Brain and leading technical design for Gemini.

Discovery Loop is established as a public benefit corporation aiming to automate the scientific method. The company intends to develop AI capable of recursive self-improvement, creating autonomous loops that propose, implement, and evaluate experiments without human intervention. The founders plan to apply this technology to accelerate breakthroughs in machine learning, drug development, computer hardware, biology, and material design.

Although Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai attempted to persuade the team to stay, the researchers cited a need to escape corporate inertia to implement radical changes. In a cooperative departure, Alphabet Inc. has become a founding investor and Cloud partner, providing seed funding and guaranteed computing power for at least one year. The startup also secured backing from Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures.