Jeff Dean leaves Google to launch AI research startup Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean, one of Google's most influential engineers and the company's 30th employee, is leaving after more than 26 years to launch Discovery Loop, an AI startup focused on accelerating scientific research. Dean will serve as CEO. Co-founders include Sanjay Ghemawat, a senior fellow and top engineer at Google; Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. The company is structured as a public benefit corporation and says it plans to use high-throughput algorithms to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments simultaneously. The goal is to cut the bottleneck of slow, sequential human iteration by automating complete experimental loops. According to the founding team, AI can go beyond answering questions and begin making discoveries.

Discovery Loop also intends to research recursive self-improvement, using AI to build more capable AI, which could remove human iterations from the loop entirely. The startup has received financial support from Alphabet, Google's parent company. Its initial funding round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital. Dean contributed to Google search's core infrastructure, including crawling, indexing, and query-serving systems, and was deeply involved in early AI research and Google Gemini's multimodal models. In a statement to The New York Times, Dean said AI can deliver both higher quantity and higher quality experiments, leading to scientific breakthroughs. Discovery Loop's approach remains to be tested, but the team's pedigree and backing suggests a serious push to make AI-driven discovery a commercial reality. The company formalized its launch on Wednesday.