Jeff Dean, a 25-year Google veteran who helped build the company’s core search infrastructure and led major AI efforts, is leaving to co-found Discovery Loop, a public-benefit corporation aiming to automate and scale scientific research with AI. Joining him are senior Google researchers Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals, with Dean set to serve as CEO. The startup, backed by Alphabet and investors including Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed and Doerr Capital, plans to run high-throughput, AI-driven experimental loops and explore recursive self-improvement—signaling intensifying competition for elite AI talent and a growing bet that automated discovery can accelerate commercial R&D.
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