Jeff Dean’s Discovery Loop: What to Know About the Google AI Veteran’s New Startup

Jeff Dean, described by Business Insider as a legendary Googler and Google’s chief scientist, is leaving to cofound a new AI company called Discovery Loop. Dean was Google’s 30th employee and spent decades helping build core products and AI systems at the search giant.

The startup is being launched with three other longtime AI and engineering figures: Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. The move matters because it shifts major AI talent from Google into a new company focused on applying AI to scientific and engineering work.

Discovery Loop is a public benefit corporation with a mission to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress, according to Dean’s post cited by Business Insider. The company’s name reflects its goal of automating the experimental loop: proposing an experiment, implementing and running it, then evaluating the results.

The startup aims to enable the “parallel execution of thousands of experiments,” which could help researchers and engineers test ideas at much greater scale. Its stated focus includes systems that can address parts of the 14 challenges formerly known as the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges.

Dean’s cofounders have extensive ties to Google’s AI and infrastructure work. Sanjay Ghemawat is one of Dean’s oldest collaborators, and the two became Google’s first level 11 engineers, carrying the title of Senior Fellows.

Oriol Vinyals, a principal scientist at Google DeepMind, focused on machine learning and reinforcement learning, including work connected to Google Translate and AlphaStar. Quoc Le was a founding member of Google Brain and worked on early large-scale neural network projects.

According to Dean, Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures led Discovery Loop’s initial round, with Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital also participating. Google parent Alphabet is also a founding investor and cloud partner, according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

The launch comes alongside broader changes at Google’s AI operation. Google announced that Demis Hassabis would become chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet, while Koray Kavukcuoglu assumed day-to-day operations of DeepMind and the title of senior vice president.