Jeff Dean Leaves Google to Start Discovery Loop, an AI Lab Built to Automate Experiments

Update, Oct. 26: In September, Business Insider reported that Discovery Loop was raising again at a valuation of around $50 billion, a few weeks after the $10 billion talks described below. Business Insider said terms could still change.

Jeff Dean, one of Google’s longest-serving and most influential executives, is leaving the company to start an AI research company called Discovery Loop. Three other well-known Google researchers are joining him as co-founders: senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, Google Brain founding member Quoc Le, and Google DeepMind senior research scientist Oriol Vinyals, TechCrunch reported on Aug. 5. Dean is expected to serve as CEO.

Discovery Loop is set up as a public benefit corporation. It plans to use AI to start and iterate on thousands of experiments at once, partly automating the research process and greatly increasing how much experimentation a team can run. The founders are also interested in using AI to build more capable AI, the process known as recursive self-improvement.

“While science and engineering have tremendously advanced society over past centuries, progress has traditionally relied on slow, sequential human iterations, creating a significant bottleneck,” the company said in its launch release. “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.”

Dean described the opportunity to The New York Times: “We think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop. You will get both a higher quantity and a higher quality of experiments, and that will lead to scientific breakthroughs and advances.”

Backers, and a $10 billion price

Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co-leading the initial round, with Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed and Doerr Capital participating. Google’s parent, Alphabet, is also backing the company. “The next great frontier for AI is to go beyond answering questions and to begin making discoveries,” the founders said in a joint statement.

Investors are already putting a high price on the team. Dean has been in discussions for $1 billion in financing at a valuation of around $10 billion, people familiar with the matter told Business Insider. For a company this new, that number reflects the founders’ track record rather than any product.

That track record is long. Dean joined Google in 1999 as roughly its 30th employee. He worked on the core infrastructure behind Google Search, including its crawling, indexing and query-serving systems, and he played a leading role in the company’s AI research and the multimodal Gemini models. Ghemawat has been his longtime engineering partner on Google’s distributed systems.

Using AI to speed up scientific discovery has interested researchers for years, but commercial use has been limited so far. Discovery Loop is betting that today’s models, given enough compute, can run the full cycle of proposing, testing and evaluating ideas. It is one of the largest groups of senior researchers yet to leave a big lab to try that.