Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist of DeepMind and Google Research, is leaving the company after almost 27 years to launch an AI startup called Discovery Loop, according to announcements from both Wired and TechCrunch.
Joining Dean as co-founders are Sanjay Ghemawat, a senior fellow at Google and Dean’s frequent collaborator; Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind, according to TechCrunch. Dean will reportedly serve as CEO.
The startup is structured as a public benefit corporation focused on using AI to accelerate scientific research. “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,” the company said in a press release cited by TechCrunch.
According to Wired, Dean described the concept at a Y Combinator event on July 25, shortly after organizing the company. He outlined an automated scientific method that would “propose an experiment, implement what you need to run the experiment, evaluate the experiment, and then you get results,” suggesting thousands of automated loops could unlock advances in science, biology, chip design, and AI model development.
The initial funding round is being co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital, according to TechCrunch. Google’s parent company Alphabet will take a stake in the new venture, Wired reported.