Four Google Veterans Team Up to Start a Company, Aiming to Let AI Run Research Experiments on Its Own

According to Dynamic Beating Monitor, former Alphabet Chief Scientist Jeff Dean has left Google after nearly 27 years and co-founded Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. The four have extensive backgrounds in key projects such as Google's foundational systems, Google Brain, Gemini, and AlphaFold.

Discovery Loop is set to start with a focus on machine learning research. After researchers pose a question, AI will write code, run experiments, analyze results, and then schedule the next round of attempts. Tasks that previously required researchers to manually drive forward can now conduct thousands of experiments simultaneously, with humans mainly responsible for setting goals and judging outcomes.

The team will initially use themselves as guinea pigs, refining models and technical architectures using this system. If successful, the approach will then be expanded to fields such as chip design, biology research, pharmaceuticals, and advanced materials. The company currently does not have a fixed office location, is recruiting its founding team, and the product is still in its early stages.

At its founding, Discovery Loop has already secured seed funding. Alphabet is a founding investor and will provide initial-year compute power through Google Cloud. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures co-led the investment, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and other institutions. The funding amount and valuation have not been disclosed yet, as the seed round is still ongoing.