Discovery Loop

AI · Startups · Scientific Research Automation

Launch

Jeff Dean leaves Google after 27 years to launch Discovery Loop

The departure leaves Gemini without both of its technical co-leads on the very day Google named their successor.

• Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le are leaving Google to co-found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation, with its seed round co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures and Alphabet joining as a founding investor and cloud partner.
• The startup aims to automate the full scientific method — proposing, running and evaluating experiments at scale — starting with machine-learning research itself before expanding into chip design, drug discovery and materials science.
• Discovery Loop's plan has three stages: automate ML research and engineering, use those tools to optimize its own tech stack, then generalize to challenges like health informatics and solar energy drawn from the National Academy of Engineering's Grand Challenges.
• Dean joined Google in 1999 as its 30th employee and spent 27 years building infrastructure like MapReduce, Bigtable and TensorFlow; Alphabet shares fell roughly 4-5% the day the departures were announced.
• The exits landed the same day Google announced Demis Hassabis is stepping down as DeepMind CEO to become Alphabet's chief scientist, with Koray Kavukcuoglu taking over DeepMind and leading Gemini 4.
• Losing both of Gemini's technical co-leads to a single new venture underscores how thin Google's bench of irreplaceable systems talent has become just as the AI arms race intensifies.