Jeff Dean, a senior Google engineer and co-creator of the Gemini AI model, has left the company to start Discovery Loop, a new startup aimed at automating the scientific method. During a talk at Y Combinator’s Startup School, Dean emphasized the importance of pursuing work that is both exciting and useful. He outlined an automated approach to scientific discovery, involving proposing experiments, implementing them, and evaluating results. This vision led to the formation of the new company, which Dean and his colleagues have been developing for several weeks.
Discovery Loop plans to use its automated systems to improve Google’s machine learning algorithms initially, with the goal of creating an AI system capable of tackling problems in multiple domains. The startup’s founders, including Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, are all senior AI researchers with extensive experience at Google. Vinyals noted that the team is focused on developing models that can generate new ideas, a capability that current AI systems lack. Le added that the startup could potentially discover a new transformer architecture.
The founders have secured initial funding from venture capital firms, including Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures, which were impressed by the team’s expertise and the potential of their idea. Despite the challenges of leaving Google, the team felt the need for greater freedom to innovate. Google has agreed to provide compute resources for the first year and will continue to collaborate with Discovery Loop as a research partner. The startup is currently maintaining stealth, with no public hires or office space yet.
Source: wired
