Jeff Dean Leaves Google After 27 Years to Launch Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean, one of Google's most influential engineers, is departing the company after nearly 27 years to launch Discovery Loop, a startup focused on automating scientific research through AI. Dean is joined by three other top-tier Google AI scientists: his longtime collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat, DeepMind VP of research Oriol Vinyals, and Google Brain cofounder Quoc Le.

The quartet aims to build AI systems that can autonomously run experimental loops—proposing experiments, implementing them, evaluating results, and iterating thousands of times to unlock breakthroughs in fields ranging from chip design to drug discovery. Google is taking a stake in the new venture and will provide computing resources for the first year, but the departure represents a significant talent drain for the search giant as it competes in the AI model race.

The automated research vision

Discovery Loop's core concept centers on creating AI that functions as a researcher rather than merely a research tool. The team plans to use the company as its own first customer, directing automated experiment loops toward improving their own machine learning algorithms. Those enhanced systems would then tackle progressively more complex domains.

"We were working on different things, but we were all starting to see the possibility of AI being able to automate scientific and engineering loops," Dean explained in an interview with WIRED, which first reported the news. Le noted his particular interest in automating machine learning itself, suggesting the system might discover novel transformer architectures.

The founders envision initially co-developing ideas with humans before deeply automating the process. Their ambitious goal: enable small teams using Discovery Loop to out-invent the world's largest research organizations.

Superstar team, rapid funding

The founding team's credentials spoke for themselves during fundraising. Dean co-founded Google Brain, serves as chief scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research, and helped build Google's core computing and search infrastructure. Vinyals was a technical lead for Gemini, while Le pioneered Google's AutoML-Zero project.

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, whose firm led the investment alongside Radical Ventures, met with the team on a Saturday to avoid tipping off Google. "With this team, I wouldn't need to know what they were doing before I backed them," Khosla said. The founders haven't disclosed funding amounts or valuation, but they structured the venture as a public benefit corporation.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly tried across multiple meetings to retain the team. "In a large organization there is always a lot of inertia you have to overcome to make any radical changes," Vinyals explained regarding their decision to leave. "We want to build something different."

Why it matters

This departure concentrates an extraordinary amount of AI expertise and institutional knowledge in a single startup. Dean and Ghemawat were among Google's earliest hires and authored fundamental infrastructure that powers the company's services. Their exit, combined with the loss of two other senior AI leaders, creates both a competitive threat and a knowledge gap for Google at a critical moment in AI development. The move also tests whether automated scientific discovery—a goal many AI leaders have articulated—can move from aspiration to reality with the right team and approach.

The team hasn't yet hired additional staff or secured office space. Dean acknowledged he's "the CEO" after his cofounders pointed at him. Details were first reported by WIRED.