Jeff Dean and Top AI Researchers Depart Google to Start New Venture

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

Teaming up with him are several esteemed researchers from Google, including Sanjay Ghemawat, a senior fellow and lead engineer; Quoc Le, a distinguished AI researcher and founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. It’s reported that Dean intends to take on the role of CEO.

The venture is named Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation aimed at utilizing AI to enhance scientific research.

Discovery Loop seeks to employ cutting-edge algorithms to initiate and manage thousands of experiments concurrently, aiming to partially automate research processes and broaden the scope of experimentation.

The startup is also exploring how AI can be utilized to develop more advanced AI (a concept known as recursive self-improvement), potentially reducing or eliminating the necessity for human involvement altogether.

“Although science and engineering have significantly advanced human civilization over centuries, progress has traditionally depended on slow, sequential human iterations that create substantial bottlenecks,” the company stated in a press release. “Discovery Loop is building advanced AI systems that harness extensive computational power to fundamentally speed up and enhance innovation by automating entire experimental workflows.”

Using AI to boost scientific discovery has been a long-standing goal in both the science and technology arenas, but it has mostly remained experimental with limited commercial opportunities until now.

The company has attracted funding from a variety of investors, including Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The initial funding round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, as disclosed on Wednesday. Other contributors include Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital.

“The next major frontier for AI is transitioning from merely answering questions to making discoveries,” the founding team stated in a collective announcement. “By dramatically expediting the processes of engineering and scientific discovery, we can introduce revolutionary technologies to the world much sooner.”

Dean has been with Google since 1999, being its 30th employee. During his tenure, he has been pivotal in developing the foundational infrastructure of Google Search, including systems for crawling, indexing, and serving queries. His influence also includes Google Gemini’s multimodal models, and he has played a significant role in the company’s early AI initiatives.

“We believe AI has the potential to fully automate what has typically been a labor-intensive experimental process,” Dean told the New York Times. “This will not only yield a greater volume of experiments but also enhance their quality, resulting in substantial scientific progress and breakthroughs.”