Four Google AI Veterans Including Jeff Dean Launch Discovery Loop Startup

Jeff Dean, one of Google's most celebrated computer scientists, has left the company after 27 years to launch a startup focused on automating scientific discovery. He's joined by three equally prominent AI researchers: Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le.

The Team and Their Exit#

Dean's departure represents a significant loss for Google. As cofounder of Google Brain, chief scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research, and technical lead on the Gemini AI model, he has been central to the company's AI strategy. Ghemawat, another early Google hire, co-authored foundational papers on the company's computing infrastructure. Vinyals serves as VP of research at DeepMind and co-led Gemini development. Le, also a Google Brain cofounder, pioneered AutoML-Zero, a system that uses machine learning to automatically design AI models.

CEO Sundar Pichai made multiple attempts to convince the team to remain, but the four ultimately decided the freedom and creative potential of a startup outweighed staying within Google's organizational constraints. Google has nevertheless blessed the departure and secured a stake in the new company, along with agreeing to provide computing resources for the first year.

Discovery Loop's Mission#

The startup, called Discovery Loop, aims to build AI systems that can autonomously run cycles of experimentation, evaluation, and iteration—essentially automating the scientific method. Rather than humans proposing hypotheses and running experiments, the AI itself would generate research ideas and conduct investigations.

The team intends to first apply this approach to improving machine learning models themselves. Once they've refined the core technology, they plan to expand into domains including chip design, drug discovery, materials science, and biology. Quoc Le notes the potential: "It might be that we will discover a different transformer architecture."

While early applications will involve co-development with human researchers, the long-term vision is full automation of discovery processes that could allow small teams working with Discovery Loop to match or exceed the research output of major organizations.

Funding and Backing#

The startup secured backing from Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures, among other investors, though the team has not disclosed funding amounts or valuations. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla emphasized the significance of the team itself: "With this team, I wouldn't need to know what they were doing before I backed them. It's the ultimate superstar team."