Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup
| Source: TechCrunch AI
Tags: Jeff Dean, Google, Discovery Loop, AI research, scientific discovery, Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, recursive self-improvement, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le
Jeff Dean—Google's 30th employee and the engineer behind Google Brain, core search infrastructure, and Gemini—is leaving after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, backed by Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Alphabet, targeting AI-automated scientific discovery and recursive self-improvement.
Details
Jeff Dean's departure from Google is one of the most significant AI talent moves in recent memory. Dean, who joined Google in 1999 as its 30th employee, helped architect core search infrastructure, co-founded Google Brain, contributed to early LLM research, and played a leading role in Gemini's multimodal development. His co-founders—Sanjay Ghemawat (senior fellow), Quoc Le (Google Brain founding member, key figure in transformer research), and Oriol Vinyals (senior research scientist at Google DeepMind, co-creator of AlphaCode and the attention mechanism)—represent a similarly deep AI talent concentration. Discovery Loop is structured as a Public Benefit Corporation with a mission to automate scientific experimentation at scale. Rather than augmenting human researchers, the goal is to run thousands of experiments in parallel via AI, compressing research timelines. The company is also exploring recursive self-improvement—AI systems that improve AI systems—which Dean described to the New York Times as enabling 'higher quantity and higher quality of experiments.' Funding comes from a co-led round by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital participating. The specific raise amount has not been disclosed. Notably, Alphabet—Google's parent—is also a financial backer, suggesting Google is choosing to hedge its relationship with its departing talent rather than compete against them. Dean will serve as CEO.