Former Google chief scientist's startup aims for $50 billion valuation 5 weeks after founding

Beating AI News Flash: Discovery Loop, founded by former Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean after leaving Google, is now in talks for a new funding round. Business Insider, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that the company is seeking a valuation of about $50 billion this time. Just weeks earlier, it was in talks to raise $1 billion at a valuation of about $10 billion. The latest deal has not yet been finalized, and the company has not confirmed it.

Discovery Loop was only founded in early August. All four founders come from Google. In addition to Dean, they include Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals. It aims to use AI to automatically complete the entire process of "proposing experiments, running them, reviewing results, and continuing to iterate," running thousands of experiments in parallel at once. The first step is to test it on machine learning research itself, and later expand to scientific and engineering problems such as drugs and chips.

At present, the official website mainly still discusses the technical roadmap and hiring, and has not yet showcased a formal product. Alphabet, Google's parent company, is both a founding investor and cloud partner of the company, while Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and others have also participated in investment. More than a month after its founding, with no public product yet released, its valuation target has already jumped from $10 billion to $50 billion. What investors are mainly betting on now is still this founding team.