AI Pioneer Jeff Dean Leaves Google to Launch Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean, one of the longest-serving and most influential executives at Google, is stepping down from the search giant to launch his own AI startup called Discovery Loop.

"While science and engineering have tremendously advanced society over past centuries, progress has traditionally relied on slow, sequential human iterations, creating a significant bottleneck," the company said in a press release. "Discovery Loop is developing advanced AI systems that leverage massive computational scale to fundamentally transform the speed and efficiency of innovation by automating complete experimental loops."

Key Co-Founders Join Dean at Discovery Loop

Coming with him as co-founders are several other top researchers at the company, 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.

Accelerating Scientific Research with AI

Discovery Loop aims 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 at which experimentation can be conducted. The startup is also interested in using AI to help create more powerful AI (a process known as recursive self-improvement), which would cut human iteration out of the loop entirely.

Initial Funding and Support

The company has received financial support from a number of different sources, including Google's parent company Alphabet. The initial funding round is being co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, the company announced Wednesday. Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital also participated.

The Future of AI Research

"The next great frontier for AI is to go beyond answering questions and to begin making discoveries," the founding team said in a joint statement. "By fundamentally accelerating how engineering and scientific discovery are conducted, we can deliver the benefits of transformative technologies to the world far sooner."

A New Era of AI Research

With the launch of Discovery Loop, the AI research landscape is poised for significant change. As one of the most influential AI researchers of his generation, Jeff Dean's departure from Google marks the beginning of a new era in AI research and development.