Jeff Dean leaves Google to launch AI research startup Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean, one of the longest-serving and most influential executives at Google, is stepping down to launch his own AI startup. Joining him as co-founders are several other senior Google researchers: Sanjay Ghemawat, a top engineer and senior fellow at Google; Quoc Le, a key AI researcher and founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Dean is reportedly planning to serve as CEO of the new venture, called Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that aims to use AI to accelerate scientific research.

Discovery Loop plans to use algorithms to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments simultaneously, with the goal of partially automating the research process and expanding the scale at which experimentation can be conducted. The startup is also interested in using AI to help build more powerful AI — a process known as recursive self-improvement — that would remove human iteration from the loop entirely.

Using AI to accelerate scientific discovery has long interested the tech industry, though until recently it remained a largely experimental field with limited commercial application. Discovery Loop has received financial backing from a number of sources, including Google’s parent company, Alphabet; the initial funding round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital also participating.

Dean has worked at Google since 1999, when he joined as the company’s 30th employee, and has contributed to core infrastructure behind Google Search’s crawling, indexing, and query-serving systems, as well as playing a leading role in Google’s early AI research and a significant part in developing Gemini’s multimodal models. “We think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop,” Dean told The New York Times. “You will get both a higher quantity and a higher quality of experiments, and that will lead to scientific breakthroughs and advances.”

Why it matters

The departure of one of Google’s most senior technical leaders to build an AI-for-science startup — backed in part by Google’s own parent company — underscores how central automating scientific discovery has become to the industry’s next competitive frontier.