Jeff Dean leaves Google to start Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean is leaving Google to launch Discovery Loop, an AI startup focused on speeding up scientific and engineering research. Dean is expected to serve as CEO, with co-founders including Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals, all senior figures in Google’s research and engineering ranks.

Discovery Loop plans to build AI systems that can run and refine many experiments in parallel, with the goal of partially automating the research process and increasing the scale of experimentation. The company is also exploring recursive self-improvement, using AI to help create more capable AI with less human iteration.

The startup has received backing from Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Its initial funding round is being co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed and Doerr Capital.

Dean has worked at Google since 1999 and was Google’s 30th employee. His work has spanned Google search infrastructure, including crawling, indexing and query-serving systems, as well as early AI research and contributions to Google Gemini’s multimodal models.