Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup

Jeff Dean, a prominent Google executive, is departing the tech giant to establish his own AI-focused startup. Joining him as co-founders are several high-profile researchers from Google, including Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals. Dean intends to lead the newly formed company, Discovery Loop, as its CEO. Their mission is to harness AI to revolutionize scientific research by speeding up the experimentation process.

Discovery Loop aims to employ advanced algorithms to run thousands of experiments concurrently, potentially automating the research process and expanding the scale of experimentation. The startup also seeks to leverage AI for recursive self-improvement, a process that could eliminate the need for human intervention in the innovation cycle.

Discovery Loop's founders believe that science and engineering have traditionally advanced society at a slow, sequential pace, creating significant bottlenecks. Their technology aims to transform the speed and efficiency of innovation by automating complete experimental loops. The company has garnered financial backing from various sources, including Alphabet, Google's parent organization.

The initial funding round is being co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital. Dean, who has been with Google since 1999, has contributed to the company's core infrastructure, multimodal models, and early AI research. He expressed optimism about the potential of AI to automate human-intensive research processes, expecting this to lead to scientific breakthroughs and advancements.