Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup
Prominent Google AI researchers, including Jeff Dean, are leaving the company to launch a startup called Discovery Loop. The company aims to use AI to automate and accelerate scientific research by running thousands of experiments simultaneously.
Why it matters
The departure of top-tier talent from major tech firms to focus on AI-driven scientific discovery signals a shift in the commercial application of advanced machine learning.
Jeff Dean, one of the longest-serving and most influential executives at Google, is stepping down from the search giant to launch his own AI startup.
Coming with him as co-founders are several other top researchers at the company, including 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.
Together, the group is starting Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that seeks to use AI to turbo-charge scientific research.
Discovery Loop says it plans to use high-octane algorithms to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments simultaneously, with the goal of partially automating the research process and expanding the scale at which experimentation can be conducted.
Get smarter about the news
Sign up free for a feed built around what you actually care about, Dive Deeper research on any story, and the full text of every article.
Create free accountAlready have an account? Sign in