A group of senior Google researchers, led by longtime executive Jeff Dean, is leaving the company to launch Discovery Loop, a startup that aims to accelerate scientific research using artificial intelligence.
Dean, one of Google’s earliest employees, will serve as chief executive. He is joined by Google Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le and Google DeepMind senior research scientist Oriol Vinyals.
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AI-Powered Research
Discovery Loop plans to use AI to automate the design, execution and refinement of thousands of experiments simultaneously, with the goal of speeding up scientific discovery. The company also intends to explore how AI can help improve future generations of AI systems through recursive self-improvement.
“While science and engineering have tremendously advanced society over past centuries, progress has traditionally relied on slow, sequential human iterations,” the company said. “Discovery Loop is developing advanced AI systems that leverage massive computational scale to fundamentally transform the speed and efficiency of innovation.”
Backed By Alphabet And Venture Investors
The startup has already secured funding from Alphabet alongside venture capital firms Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed and Doerr Capital.
“The next great frontier for AI is to go beyond answering questions and to begin making discoveries,” the founding team said.
Dean joined Google in 1999 as the company’s 30th employee and helped build key parts of Google Search before leading major AI initiatives, including work on Gemini. Explaining the vision behind Discovery Loop, he said AI could automate much of today’s research process, enabling scientists to conduct more experiments and accelerate breakthroughs.
