Jeff Dean and Top AI Researchers Depart Google to Launch New Startup

Jeff Dean, one of Google's longest-serving and most influential executives, is stepping down from the search giant to launch a new AI startup, according to a report from The New York Times. Dean, who joined Google in 1999 as its 30th employee, will serve as CEO of the venture, which he is co-founding with several prominent colleagues. Joining Dean as co-founders are Sanjay Ghemawat, a senior fellow and top engineer at Google; Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain and key AI researcher; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. The group is launching Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation aimed at using AI to accelerate scientific research. Discovery Loop plans to deploy high-performance algorithms to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments simultaneously, partially automating the research process and dramatically scaling the scope of experimentation. The startup also aims to leverage AI to build more powerful AI systems—a concept known as recursive self-improvement—which could eliminate human intervention from the iterative cycle entirely. "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 said 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 use of AI to accelerate scientific discovery has long been a focus for the science and tech communities, but it has only recently begun transitioning from experimental research into commercially viable applications. As of 2026, the field is gaining momentum, with startups and established players alike exploring AI-driven research automation. Discovery Loop has secured financial backing from multiple sources, including Alphabet, Google's parent company. The initial funding round, announced Wednesday, is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital. "The next great frontier for AI is to go beyond answering questions and to begin making discoveries," the founding team said in a joint statement. "By fundamentally accelerating how engineering and scientific discovery are conducted, we can deliver the benefits of transformative technologies to the world far sooner." Dean's departure marks the end of an era at Google, where he spent over two decades shaping its core infrastructure, including the crawling, indexing, and query-serving systems for Google Search. He also had a significant impact on Google Gemini's multimodal models and played a leading role in the company's early AI research. "We think there is opportunity for AI to..." The startup's full vision remains under wraps, but with such a distinguished team and strong backing, Discovery Loop is poised to make waves in the AI research landscape.

via TechCrunch AI