Jeff Dean, one of Google’s longest-serving and most influential researchers, is leaving the company after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop, an AI startup focused on automating scientific and engineering research. He is joined by Google veterans Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals, with Dean reportedly set to serve as chief executive.
Discovery Loop is structured as a public benefit corporation and aims to build AI systems capable of running thousands of experiments in parallel. The company wants to automate more of the cycle between forming an idea, conducting an experiment, analysing the results and deciding what to test next.
AI Systems Will Run Experiments at Scale
The company said scientific and engineering progress has traditionally depended on slow, sequential rounds of human experimentation. Discovery Loop plans to use large-scale computing and AI to run many of those processes simultaneously.
Its systems could generate experimental ideas, implement them, evaluate the results and use the findings to begin another round of testing. The company is also interested in applying the same approach to machine learning research, where AI systems could help improve subsequent generations of AI.
Dean told the New York Times that automating parts of the experimental process could increase both the number and quality of experiments researchers are able to conduct. The company believes that could shorten the time required to produce useful scientific and engineering advances.
Discovery Loop announced its launch through its official account on X, saying its goal is to build AI capable of running experiments at previously unavailable scale.
Four Google Veterans Form the Founding Team
Dean joined Google in 1999 as its 30th employee and helped develop some of the infrastructure behind Google Search, including systems for crawling, indexing and serving queries. He later co-founded Google Brain and held senior roles overseeing the company’s AI research.
Ghemawat worked closely with Dean on major distributed computing technologies at Google and became one of the company’s first senior fellows. Quoc Le was a founding member of Google Brain, while Vinyals was a principal scientist at Google DeepMind whose work included reinforcement learning and the AlphaStar system.
Their departure coincides with changes to Google’s AI leadership. Demis Hassabis is becoming chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet, while Google DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu will take responsibility for more of the organisation’s day-to-day operations.
Alphabet Joins Discovery Loop’s Investors
Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures co-led Discovery Loop’s initial financing round. Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed and Doerr Capital also participated, while Alphabet joined as a founding investor and cloud partner.
The amount raised was not publicly disclosed. Alphabet’s involvement means Discovery Loop will continue to have a commercial relationship with Dean’s former employer even as its founding team operates independently.
The startup joins a growing group of companies applying AI to scientific research, including areas such as drug development, materials science and engineering. Discovery Loop plans to focus on systems that can automate entire experimental cycles rather than using AI only to analyse existing research.
Further details about the company were first reported by TechCrunch.
Featured image credits: Magnific.com
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