Google AI chief Jeff Dean launches Discovery Loop startup

Jeff Dean, one of Google's most senior and longest-serving AI executives, announced he is leaving the company to launch Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation dedicated to accelerating scientific research through AI. Dean, who joined Google in 1999 as its 30th employee, is co-founding the startup alongside three other prominent Google researchers: Sanjay Ghemawat, a top engineer and senior fellow; Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Dean will serve as CEO.

Discovery Loop's core mission is to automate and scale scientific experimentation. The company plans to use advanced algorithms to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments simultaneously, with the goal of partially automating the entire research process. In a press release, the company noted that "science and engineering have tremendously advanced society over past centuries, progress has traditionally relied on slow, sequential human iterations, creating a significant bottleneck." By eliminating this bottleneck, Discovery Loop believes it can deliver both higher quantity and higher quality experiments. The startup is also pursuing recursive self-improvement—using AI to generate more powerful AI, which would remove human iteration from that feedback loop entirely.

Dean told the New York Times: "We think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop. You will get both a higher quantity and a higher quality of experiments, and that will lead to scientific breakthroughs and advances." While using AI to accelerate scientific discovery has been a topic of interest in science and tech communities for years, it has remained largely experimental with limited commercial application until recently.

The startup has secured financial backing from a range of prominent investors. The initial funding round is being co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with additional participation from Alphabet (Google's parent company), Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital. In a joint statement, the founding team said: "The next great frontier for AI is to go beyond answering questions and to begin making discoveries. By fundamentally accelerating how engineering and scientific discovery are conducted, we can deliver the benefits of transformative technologies to the world far sooner."