Google AI Veteran Jeff Dean Launches Discovery Loop Startup

Jeff Dean, one of Google’s longest-serving executives and one of the company’s most influential artificial intelligence researchers, is leaving the technology giant to launch a new AI startup focused on accelerating scientific discovery.

Several prominent Google researchers join Dean as co-founders, including senior fellow and engineer Sanjay Ghemawat, Google Brain founding member Quoc Le, and Google DeepMind senior research scientist Oriol Vinyals. The new company, called Discovery Loop, has been established as a public benefit corporation, with Dean expected to serve as chief executive officer.

The startup aims to develop AI systems capable of dramatically increasing the pace of scientific and engineering research by automating large portions of the experimental process.

AI designed to accelerate discovery.

Discovery Loop said it plans to use advanced algorithms to design, execute and refine thousands of experiments simultaneously rather than relying on the slower, sequential process traditionally carried out by human researchers. According to the company, this approach could significantly increase both the scale and speed of innovation.

The company is also exploring recursive self-improvement, a technique in which AI systems help develop more capable AI models, reducing the amount of human intervention required during research and development.

In announcing the venture, Discovery Loop said that although science and engineering have transformed society over centuries, progress has often been constrained by slow, human-driven experimentation. The company believes AI can automate complete experimental cycles and substantially improve research efficiency.

Backed by major investors

The startup has already secured financial backing from several prominent investors, including Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Its initial funding round is being co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed and Doerr Capital.

In a joint statement, the founding team said the next stage of artificial intelligence extends beyond answering questions to actively making discoveries, enabling scientific and engineering breakthroughs to reach society much faster.

A major departure from Google

Dean joined Google in 1999 as the company’s 30th employee and has played a central role in building many of its core technologies. During his career, he helped develop Google’s search infrastructure, including its crawling, indexing and query-serving systems, while also contributing significantly to the company’s AI research and the development of Gemini’s multimodal models.

Speaking to The New York Times, Dean said he believes AI presents an opportunity to automate much of the experimental loop traditionally performed by researchers, leading to both a greater quantity and higher quality of experiments that could ultimately produce faster scientific breakthroughs.