Jeff Dean, one of Google's longest-serving and most influential executives, is stepping down from the company to start an AI venture, according to the startup's announcement. Dean reportedly plans to serve as CEO of Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation aimed at using AI to accelerate scientific research.

The founding team includes Google researchers Sanjay Ghemawat, a senior fellow and top engineer; Quoc Le, a key AI researcher and founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Discovery Loop says it plans to use advanced algorithms to launch and iterate thousands of experiments at once, partially automating the research process and expanding the scale of experimentation. It is also exploring recursive self-improvement — using AI to help create more powerful AI — which would remove human iteration from certain parts of the process.

"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 a press 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."

Alphabet, Google's parent company, has provided financial support. The initial funding round is being co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital also participating.

"The next great frontier for AI is to go beyond answering questions and to begin making discoveries," the founding team said in a joint statement. "By fundamentally accelerating how engineering and scientific discovery are conducted, we can deliver the benefits of transformative technologies to the world far sooner."

Dean joined Google in 1999 as its 30th employee and worked on core search infrastructure, including crawling, indexing, and query-serving systems. He also played a leading role in early AI research and contributed to Google Gemini's multimodal models. He told 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."

Source: TechCrunch