Jeff Dean, a long-serving and influential executive at Google, is leaving the company to launch his own AI startup. He will serve as CEO of Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation co-founded by Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals. The startup aims to use advanced algorithms to automate and scale scientific experimentation. Discovery Loop plans to use AI to accelerate scientific discovery by enabling thousands of experiments to run simultaneously, with the goal of reducing human involvement in the research process. The company said it is developing AI systems that can fundamentally transform the speed and efficiency of innovation by automating complete experimental loops. "While science and engineering have tremendously advanced society over past centuries, progress has traditionally relied on slow, sequential human iterations, creating a significant bottleneck," the company stated in a press release. "Discovery Loop is developing advanced AI systems that leverage massive computational scale to fundamentally transform the speed and efficiency of innovation by automating complete experimental loops."
The startup has received financial support from various sources, including Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The initial funding round is being co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with additional participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital. The founding team emphasized that the next great frontier for AI is to go beyond answering questions and to begin making discoveries. "By fundamentally accelerating how engineering and scientific discovery are conducted, we can deliver the benefits of transformative technologies to the world far sooner," the team said in a joint statement.
Dean has been with Google since 1999 and was the company’s 30th employee. He has contributed to Google search’s core infrastructure, including its crawling and indexing system and query-serving system. He also played a leading role in the company’s early AI research and has had a significant impact on Google Gemini’s multimodal models. "We think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop," Dean told the New York Times. "You will get both a higher quantity and a higher quality of experiments, and that will lead to scientific breakthroughs and advances."
Source: techcrunch
