Jeff Dean is leaving Google after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop, a startup that aims to automate the scientific method using artificial intelligence. Dean, Google’s chief scientist, is departing alongside Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, four of the company’s most influential AI and infrastructure leaders, to launch the public benefit corporation.
Discovery Loop will focus on automating machine learning and scientific experiments, with initial applications in drug discovery, chip design, biology, and material design. The idea emerged only weeks ago when the four founders, long-time collaborators who vacation together, realized they shared a vision of AI automating entire research loops—proposing experiments, implementing them, evaluating results, and iterating based on findings.
In a presentation at Y Combinator’s Startup School on July 25, Dean described his interest in “an automated version of the scientific method” that could unlock breakthroughs across multiple domains. He was discussing his own secret startup, which became official on August 5. Dean will serve as CEO, according to the Wired report of his interview with the founders.
The four co-founders secured funding from venture capital firms including Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures, though they declined to disclose the amount or valuation. Google itself is investing in Discovery Loop and has committed to providing compute power for the first year, according to a statement from Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. Pichai said the company will “continue to work with Discovery Loop as a founding investor and Cloud partner, and collaborate on a research framework for ML systems and related infrastructure advances.”
The departure marks a significant loss for Google at a critical moment. Dean and Ghemawat co-designed and implemented core infrastructure that still powers the company today, including Spanner, a large-scale distributed database system. Vinyals served as VP of research at DeepMind and was a technical lead for Gemini, Google’s flagship AI model. Le co-founded Google Brain and led the research behind AutoML-Zero, a project that uses machine learning to autonomously build AI products.
The exodus coincides with a broader leadership overhaul at Google DeepMind. Demis Hassabis, the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, is stepping back from daily management to become Alphabet’s chief scientist, focusing on artificial general intelligence strategy and his drug-discovery company, Isomorphic Labs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, the unit’s chief technology officer, will assume day-to-day responsibilities as senior vice president. Alphabet’s stock fell 4 percent following the announcements.
The departures reflect mounting pressure on Google to maintain its position in the intensifying AI race. In June, Noam Shazeer, who co-led Gemini development, left for OpenAI, and John Jumper, a Nobel Prize-winning researcher, joined Anthropic. These moves came as Google’s flagship Gemini 4 model remained unreleased despite a planned June launch, raising investor concerns that the company was falling behind rivals in the competitive AI landscape.
Dean and Ghemawat’s decision to leave represents a particularly striking departure. They were among Google’s earliest employees—brought in during its formative years when the company had just 25 people. Under their stewardship and that of their co-founders, Google grew to over 190,000 employees. In interviews, the Discovery Loop founders emphasized the freedom and agility of a startup environment compared to navigating the inertia of a large organization. “In a large organization there is always a lot of inertia you have to overcome to make any radical changes,” Vinyals told Wired. “We want to build something different.”
Sources
- Wired — Interview with the four co-founders; details on the startup’s mission, funding, and the founders’ vision for automating scientific discovery
- Reuters — Confirmation of the departure, details on Demis Hassabis’s role transition, Koray Kavukcuoglu’s appointment, stock market reaction, and context on prior departures
- X (formerly Twitter) — Jeff Dean’s announcement of his departure and the founding of Discovery Loop
- Google Blog — Confirmation of Jeff Dean’s status as chief scientist and his tenure at Google
- TechCrunch — Reporting on the startup launch and Dean’s role as CEO
