Google AI veteran Jeff Dean leaves to launch Discovery Loop startup

Google's top AI researchers, including Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, are leaving the tech giant to launch a new startup called Discovery Loop. The team aims to create automated scientific and engineering loops that can advance multiple fields such as science, biology, chip design, and AI model improvement. Dean's idea for an automated version of the scientific method caught the attention of the group, leading them to form Discovery Loop.

Other key members include Oriol Vinyals, VP of research at DeepMind, and Quoc Le, a co-founder of Google Brain and the creator of Google's AutoML-Zero. The startup is poised to challenge Google in the AI model competition, as the founders are among the company's first hires. Vinyals and Le expressed excitement about automating machine learning and the potential for creating superhuman advances in various domains.

The team plans to initially focus on improving their advanced machine learning algorithms, which will then become the foundation for tackling problems in other fields. They envision that humans will initially codevelop these ideas, but ultimately aim for deep automation. Google provided the departing engineers with an investment and an arrangement to provide compute power for the first year, acknowledging their significant contributions to the company.

Despite the leadership's efforts to maintain stealth, the team has not yet begun hiring or renting office space.