Jeff Dean and other top Google AI researchers found Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean, one of Google's most influential and longest-serving executives, is leaving the company to launch his own AI startup. Joining him as co-founders are Sanjay Ghemawat, senior engineer and fellow at Google; Quoc Le, key AI researcher and founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. The company, Discovery Loop, will be a public benefit corporation focused on using AI to accelerate scientific research. The goal is to use advanced algorithms to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments simultaneously, partially automating the research process and expanding the scale at which experimentation can be conducted. It also plans to use AI to improve AI (recursive self-improvement). Initial funding is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital. Dean has worked at Google since 1999 and was the company's 30th employee.