Jeff Dean and other top Google researchers leave to launch AI startup

Jeff Dean, one of the longest-serving and most influential executives at Google, is stepping down to launch his own AI startup. He is joined by several other top researchers, including 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 reportedly plans to serve as CEO.

Together, the group is starting Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that seeks to use AI to turbo-charge scientific research. The startup says it plans to use high-octane algorithms to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments simultaneously, with the goal of partially automating the research process and expanding the scale of experimentation. Discovery Loop is also interested in using AI to create more powerful AI — a process known as recursive self-improvement — which would remove human iteration from the loop entirely.

In a press release, the company said that while science and engineering have greatly advanced society, progress has traditionally relied on slow, sequential human iterations, creating a bottleneck. Discovery Loop aims to build advanced AI systems that leverage massive computational scale to transform the speed and efficiency of innovation by automating complete experimental loops.

The venture has received financial support from several sources, including Alphabet, Google's parent company. The initial funding round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital. In a joint statement, the founding team said that the next great frontier for AI is to go beyond answering questions and begin making discoveries, delivering the benefits of transformative technologies sooner.

Dean has worked at Google since 1999 and was the company's 30th employee. He contributed to core search infrastructure, including crawling, indexing, and query-serving systems, and played a leading role in early AI research and the development of Google Gemini's multimodal models. Speaking to The New York Times, Dean said he believes AI can more fully automate the traditionally human-intensive experimental loop, leading to both higher quantity and higher quality of experiments and ultimately scientific breakthroughs.