Jeff Dean, a prominent figure at Google with a long tenure, is departing from the company to embark on an entrepreneurial journey focused on artificial intelligence. He is joined by a team of distinguished researchers, including Sanjay Ghemawat, a leading engineer and senior fellow at Google; Quoc Le, a pivotal AI researcher and co-founder of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist from Google DeepMind. Dean aims to take on the role of CEO for their new venture.
The new endeavor is called Discovery Loop, envisioned as a public benefit corporation dedicated to harnessing AI to enhance scientific research. The organization intends to deploy sophisticated algorithms to run thousands of experiments concurrently, with the ambition of partially automating research processes and significantly increasing the scale of experimentation.
One of the innovative concepts Discovery Loop plans to explore is using AI to aid in the development of more advanced AI systems, a practice termed recursive self-improvement, which would ultimately remove the need for human input in the iterative process.
According to the company's press release, “Although science and engineering have advanced society tremendously over the years, innovation has historically been hindered by slow, sequential human iterations that create a notable bottleneck.” Discovery Loop is striving to create AI systems capable of leveraging vast computational power to drastically enhance the speed and efficiency of innovation through automation of entire experimental processes.
The integration of AI in speeding up scientific discoveries has intrigued both scientific and technological spheres for years, but only recently has it shifted from being predominantly experimental to having viable commercial opportunities.
Discovery Loop has secured funding from various sources, including Alphabet, Google's parent company. The startup's initial funding round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with contributions from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital.
The founding team stated, “The next significant frontier for AI is to transition from merely answering questions to actively making discoveries. By fundamentally speeding up how engineering and scientific exploration occurs, we can introduce the benefits of groundbreaking technologies to the world much more rapidly.”
Having joined Google in 1999 as the company's 30th employee, Dean has been instrumental in developing critical components of Google’s search infrastructure, including its systems for crawling, indexing, and query processing. He has also played a vital role in the advancement of Google Gemini's multimodal models and was central to the company's early efforts in AI research.
Dean expressed his vision in an interview with the New York Times, stating, “We see an opportunity for AI to fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-centered experimental loop. This approach will not only yield a greater quantity of experiments but also improve their quality, ultimately leading to significant scientific breakthroughs and advancements.”
