Google loses Jeff Dean and 3 AI stars to Discovery Loop startup

Jeff Dean, cofounder of Google Brain, chief scientist at Google DeepMind, and technical colead on Gemini, is leaving Google after nearly 27 years. He's joined by Sanjay Ghemawat, his long-time collaborator and one of Google's first engineers, along with Oriol Vinyals, VP of research at DeepMind and Gemini technical lead, and Quoc Le, cofounder of Google Brain and creator of AutoML-Zero. Together they've founded Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on automating the scientific method. The startup aims to run thousands of autonomous loops—proposing experiments, implementing them, evaluating results, and iterating—to accelerate breakthroughs in fields like chip design, biology, and material science.

Discovery Loop will first apply its approach to improve its own machine learning models, potentially discovering new architectures like novel transformers. The team believes these enhanced models can then generalize to other domains, co-developing ideas with humans before fully automating the process. If successful, a few people could out-invent large research organizations. Google takes a stake in the startup, but losing four senior AI researchers is a major hit to the search giant's competitive position in AI. The founders described their startup to VCs with a simple pitch deck, relying on their reputations to attract funding.