Google AI Chief Jeff Dean Launches Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean is leaving Google after more than 25 years to start his own company. Dean, who joined the search giant in 1999 and became a fixture of its AI research operations, will serve as CEO of the new venture, called Discovery Loop. He's not going alone. Sanjay Ghemawat, a senior fellow and one of Google's top engineers, is joining as a co-founder, along with Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain, and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind.

The four researchers rank among the most cited names in modern AI, and their departure marks a significant loss for Google's research bench. Discovery Loop is structured as a public benefit corporation, and its stated mission is narrow but ambitious: use AI to run thousands of scientific experiments at once, cutting humans out of much of the iteration process. The company is also looking at recursive self-improvement, using AI systems to design better AI systems without waiting on people to steer each step.

In a press release announcing the launch, Discovery Loop laid out its case for why the current pace of research needs an overhaul.