Jeff Dean is leaving Google after almost 27 years to cofound Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. On July 25, he told 6,000 would-be founders at Startup School in San Francisco’s Chase Center that startup work should begin with something you are excited about and would be useful in the world.
Dean said he was interested in an automated version of the scientific method. He described the loop this way: "You propose an experiment, you implement what you need to run the experiment, you evaluate the experiment, and then you get results from that."
Discovery Loop’s first target
The company plans to start with autonomous experiment loops that improve its own machine learning algorithms. That means the founders are trying to build software that can test ideas, measure results, and feed those results back into the next round of work without human teams manually running every step.
Dean said the idea came up only a few weeks ago. The speed matters because the launch turns a conversation into a company almost immediately, rather than letting the plan sit in research mode.
Google loses four AI scientists
Google is taking a stake in Discovery Loop even as it loses four senior AI scientists. Dean is a cofounder of Google Brain and chief scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research, while Ghemawat wrote significant parts of Google’s computing and search infrastructure.
Vinyals is VP of research at DeepMind and a technical lead for Gemini. Le is a cofounder of Google Brain and the key scientist behind AutoML-Zero. The departure removes people who have worked on core systems and current AI models at the same time.
What Discovery Loop may build next
Le said, "I’m very excited about automating machine learning" and added, "It might be that we will discover a different transformer architecture." Vinyals said, "As we create the core intelligence and the discovery loop fundamentals, we'll be able to quickly generalize to other domains."
For now, the practical question is how much ownership or control Google will have in Discovery Loop. The founders have already named the first use case and the broader domains they want to reach, but the structure of that stake is still the missing piece that will tell readers how close this new company still is to its old one.
