Google's Top AI Scientists Depart to Launch Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean, the legendary Google engineer and cofounder of Google Brain, revealed on July 25 at Y Combinator's Startup School his interest in an automated version of the scientific method, which was actually his secret startup. Today it is official: after nearly 27 years, Dean is leaving Google along with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le to found Discovery Loop. The company aims to create autonomous experiment loops that can run thousands of automated scientific processes, initially to improve their own machine learning algorithms, then expand to chip design, biology, drug discovery, and material design. The idea came together only a few weeks before launch, and the team quickly organized a pitch deck and secured funding from Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures, among others, at an undisclosed valuation. Google CEO Sundar Pichai tried to retain them but ultimately gave his blessing, with Google taking a stake and providing compute power for the first year. The cofounders have not yet hired a team or rented office space, and Dean sheepishly confirmed he is the CEO. The mission is to have AI act as the researcher itself, potentially allowing small teams to out-invent large research organizations.