Jeff Dean and Prominent AI Researchers Depart Google to Start Their Own Venture

Jeff Dean, a pivotal figure at Google, is leaving the tech giant to establish his own AI startup.

He will be joined as co-founders by several esteemed researchers from the company, including Sanjay Ghemawat, a leading engineer and senior fellow at Google, Quoc Le, a prominent AI researcher and founding member of Google Brain, and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Reports indicate that Dean intends to take on the role of CEO.

The team is launching Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation aimed at harnessing AI to enhance scientific research.

Discovery Loop plans to deploy sophisticated algorithms to initiate and manage thousands of experiments concurrently, aiming to partially automate the research process and increase the scope of experimentation.

The startup is also exploring ways to utilize AI to develop more advanced AI (a method referred to as recursive self-improvement), which could eliminate the need for human iteration altogether.

“While science and engineering have significantly advanced society over the centuries, progress has typically depended on slow, sequential human iterations, creating a major bottleneck,” the company stated in a press release. “Discovery Loop is building advanced AI systems that utilize massive computational resources to fundamentally enhance the speed and efficiency of innovation by automating entire experimental loops.”

Accelerating scientific discovery through AI has long been a focus for both the science and technology sectors, but it has primarily remained an experimental domain with limited commercial viability until recently.

The company has garnered financial backing from various sources, including Google’s parent company, Alphabet. The initial funding round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, as announced on Wednesday. Additional participation came from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital.

“The next great frontier for AI is to evolve from merely answering questions to making discoveries,” the founding team said in a unified statement. “By significantly accelerating the processes of engineering and scientific discovery, we can bring the benefits of transformative technologies to the world much sooner.”

Dean has been with Google since 1999, being the company’s 30th employee. Throughout his tenure, he has played a crucial role in the core infrastructure of Google search, including its crawling and indexing systems and query-serving capabilities. His influence extends to Google Gemini’s multimodal models, and he has been a leading figure in the company’s early AI initiatives.

“We believe there is potential for AI to fully automate what has traditionally been a labor-intensive experimental process,” Dean shared with the New York Times. “This will not only yield a greater quantity of experiments but also enhance their quality, leading to significant scientific breakthroughs and advancements.”