Jeff Dean leaves Google to start AI research company Discovery Loop

In short: Jeff Dean and three other senior Google AI researchers are leaving to start a new company called Discovery Loop.

What happened

Jeff Dean, a long-time Google engineer and a leader on Google’s Gemini AI model, is leaving the company after nearly 27 years. He is starting a new startup called Discovery Loop with three other well-known AI researchers, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le.

The team says Discovery Loop will focus on “automated discovery loops.” That means using AI to repeatedly run an experiment cycle: come up with an idea, test it, check the results, then try again. It is like having a lab assistant that can run many rounds of trial and error quickly, instead of a person doing each step by hand.

At first, the company plans to use this approach on its own work, by trying to improve the AI systems it builds. Over time, the founders say the same method could also be used in areas like chip design (planning computer chips), biology, drug discovery, and materials research.

Google will take a stake in Discovery Loop and will provide computing power for the first year, according to the report. The startup has raised funding from Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures, but it is not sharing the amount.

Why it matters

This is notable because it involves some of Google’s best-known AI talent leaving to build a separate company, even while Google stays involved as an investor. If Discovery Loop succeeds, it could make research faster by running many more “test and learn” cycles than most teams can manage today.

Source: Wired