Google veterans launch AI-driven research startup Discovery Loop

According to Beating Monitor, Jeff Dean, former Chief Scientist at Alphabet, has left Google after nearly 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. The team’s collective expertise spans Google’s core systems, Google Brain, Gemini, and AlphaFold. Discovery Loop will initially focus on machine learning research: researchers pose questions, and the AI writes code, runs experiments, analyzes results, and schedules the next round of trials. Tasks that previously required researchers to manually iterate can now be conducted across thousands of experiments simultaneously, with humans primarily responsible for defining goals and evaluating outcomes. The team will first use the system to improve its own models and technical architecture; if successful, they plan to expand into chip design, biological research, new drugs, and advanced materials. The company has not yet established an office and is currently recruiting its founding team, with the product still in early development. Discovery Loop has already secured seed funding, with Alphabet as a founding investor and providing its first year of computing power via Google Cloud. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co-leading the round, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and others. The funding amount and valuation have not been disclosed, and the seed round is still open.