Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le leave Google to found Discovery Loop, a PBC to automate ML research and science
On 5 Aug 2026 Google's chief scientist Jeff Dean left after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a public benefit corporation with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le. It aims to "automate the experimental loop" (propose, run, evaluate and iterate on experiments), starting with ML research and engineering and later other sciences. Alphabet is an investor, and by mid-September it was reportedly in talks at a ~$50B valuation.
Key facts
- Founders: Jeff Dean (CEO per TechCrunch), Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals (Gemini co-lead), Quoc Le (Google Brain founding member)
- Structure: Public Benefit Corporation; mission 'to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress'
- Initial round co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed and Doerr Capital; Alphabet also invested (TechCrunch); Pichai's memo called Google a founding investor and cloud partner
- TechCrunch: the founders are interested in recursive self-improvement (automating AI improvement without human iteration)
- Valuation (secondary, Business Insider via TFN, 14 Sep 2026): talks at ~$50B, weeks after a reported ~$10B; not confirmed by the company
- Announced the same day as Demis Hassabis stepping aside as Google DeepMind CEO
What happened
Jeff Dean announced on X that he, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le were founding Discovery Loop. The four have worked together for 14 to 30 years. The company wants to automate the experimental loop of research, running far more experiments than humans could. It starts with machine-learning research and engineering, and press reports name hardware design, drug discovery and clean energy as later targets. Dean told TechCrunch: "You will get both a higher quantity and a higher quality of experiments, and that will lead to scientific breakthroughs."
Why it matters
Some of the most senior people behind Google's infrastructure (MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow) and its AI models (Gemini, seq2seq) left in a single move to build an automated-research lab. This happened in the middle of a DeepMind leadership shake-up, and it is a direct bet on automating AI research, a key step toward recursive self-improvement.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created (lead from data/leads.md)
Related posts (1)
- Announcing Discovery Loop Jeff Dean @JeffDean · x · 2026-08-05
Google's longtime chief scientist left after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop, a PBC to automate the ML/scientific experimental loop, taking Gemini co-lead Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le with him.
Related events
- Demis Hassabis steps aside as Google DeepMind CEO; Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over, Jeff Dean leaves ★★★★
Sources (6)
- officialJeff Dean on X: Announcing Discovery Loop
- officialDiscovery Loop website
- pressTechCrunch: Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup
- pressGeekWire: The startup idea that convinced Jeff Dean to leave Google after 27 years
- pressQuartz: Jeff Dean leaving Google after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop
- pressTech Funding News: Discovery Loop targets $50B valuation (citing Business Insider)
id: 2026-08-05-discovery-loop-founded · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline