Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat Exit Google, Launch AI Startup to ‘Accelerate Discoveries’

Jeff Dean, Google’s former Chief Scientist, and former Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat have left the company to launch Discovery Loop. The public benefit corporation will build AI systems to automate scientific and engineering research.

They are joined by Oriol Vinyals, formerly Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind, and Quoc Le, an ex-Google Fellow.

Alphabet has joined the company as a founding investor alongside venture capital firms Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital.

The startup’s mission is to “automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress.”

Its first area of work will be machine learning research and engineering, where it plans to build AI systems capable of proposing experiments, running them, analysing results, and iterating with minimal human intervention.

“Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop,” Dean wrote in a post on X. “We'll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important subproblems in nearly every one of the 14 NAE Grand Challenge problems.”

According to the founders, today’s scientific process depends on sequential experimentation, wherein researchers propose an idea, conduct an experiment, analyse the outcome, and repeat the cycle. Discovery Loop aims to automate that workflow using frontier AI models and large-scale computing infrastructure.

“By utilising frontier AI models and large-scale computational infrastructure, our systems will be able to rapidly propose, run, and learn from evaluations,” the company said in a blog post. “This approach allows for the parallel execution of thousands of experiments, drastically compressing iteration time.”

The founders said they will first use the platform internally to improve machine learning research.

The company is now looking for office space and hiring its founding team while beginning work on its infrastructure, AI models, and research systems.

Discovery Loop has been incorporated as a public benefit corporation, a structure that allows companies to pursue public-interest goals alongside shareholder returns. OpenAI’s commercial arm also operated as a public benefit corporation.

The founders said their long-term objective is to accelerate progress across science and engineering by automating experimental workflows beyond machine learning.

Dean is stepping down after nearly 27 years at Google, where he helped build the company’s distributed computing infrastructure and co-founded the Google Brain project in 2011. 

Ghemawat was one of Google’s earliest engineers and co-created foundational technologies including Google File System, MapReduce, and Bigtable. Their departure is part of a wider reshuffle of Google’s AI leadership under Demis Hassabis and Koray Kavukcuoglu.