Jeff Dean leaves Google to launch Discovery Loop, an AI startup for scientific discovery

Jeff Dean, one of Google's longest-serving and most influential executives, is stepping down from the search giant to launch his own AI startup aimed at accelerating scientific discovery.

He is joined by co-founders Sanjay Ghemawat, a top engineer and senior fellow at Google; Quoc Le, a key AI researcher and founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Dean reportedly plans to serve as CEO.

The new company, Discovery Loop, is a public benefit corporation that plans to use high-octane algorithms to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments simultaneously, partially automating the research process and expanding the scale of experimentation.

Discovery Loop is also exploring recursive self-improvement — using AI to build more powerful AI — with the ambition of removing humans from the loop entirely. "Discovery Loop is developing advanced AI systems that leverage massive computational scale to fundamentally transform the speed and efficiency of innovation by automating complete experimental loops," the company said in a press release.

The company has received financial support from multiple sources, including Google's parent company Alphabet; the initial funding round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital also participating.

Dean joined Google in 1999 as its 30th employee, helped build core search infrastructure such as crawling, indexing, and query serving, and played a leading role in early AI research and Gemini's multimodal models.

"We think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop," Dean told the New York Times, arguing that this will lead to more and better experiments and scientific breakthroughs. His exit is one of the most significant departures from Google's AI leadership in years.