Legendary Googler Jeff Dean is starting his own AI company.
On Wednesday, Dean, Google’s chief scientist, announced that he and three other colleagues were leaving to start Discovery Loop, an AI startup focused on AI applications in science and engineering.
Here’s everything we know about the new venture
What is Discovery Loop?
Discovery Loop is a public benefit corporation “whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress,” Dean wrote on X.
The loop part of the name comes from the company’s goal of automating the process by which scientists and engineers propose an experiment, implement and run it, and evaluate the results.
The company hopes this automation can unlock some of the trickiest problems in science and engineering by enabling “parallel execution of thousands of experiments.”
Specifically, Discovery Loop wants to build systems that can tackle parts of the 14 challenges laid out by some of the world’s most accomplished scientists and engineers to improve life as we know it. Formerly known as the “National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges,” the 14 topics range from “Reverse Engineer the Brain” to “Prevent Nuclear Terror.”
Interestingly, the 2008 committee that came up with the grand challenges included Larry Page, the cofounder of Google.
Who is funding Discovery Loop?
According to Dean, Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, two Silicon Valley mainstays, led the initial round. Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital also participated.
We created a pitch deck to tell a handful of VC firms about us and what we were up to (a fun experience!). Here’s a few slides about our background and some of the things we’ve worked on from the pitch deck (it was fun putting together the list of people in our teams who have… pic.twitter.com/7glcm9T9XG
— Jeff Dean (@JeffDean) August 5, 2026
In a sign of how he left things at Google, Alphabet is a founding investor and cloud partner, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said.
“I also want to give a huge thanks to the incomparable @JeffDean after an incredible 27-year run at Google,” Pichai wrote on X.
Who is Jeff Dean?
If you’ve used Google in the last two decades, you have Jeff Dean to thank. As Google’s 30th employee, his tenure spans from establishing Google’s dominance in search to the creation of generative AI models.
Dean helped advance Google Search, Google News, Google Translate, and Google Ads.
If that wasn’t enough, Dean co-founded the Google Brain team that, as the “Godfather of AI” and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton put it, turned “basic research in neural nets into game-changing products.” One of the biggest breakthroughs Dean helped develop was the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which is credited with accelerating AI research.
As Google’s AI head, Dean oversaw AI research and later co-led the development of Gemini, Google’s family of models.
Many of the biggest names in AI worked alongside Dean, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, and more.
Who else is leading Discovery Loop?
Sanjay Ghemawat: Ghemawat is one of Dean’s oldest collaborators, going back to before the pair joined Google when they worked at Digital Equipment Corporation.
At Google, the pair became so inseparable that Dean’s kids called Ghemawat “Uncle Sanjay,” according to a 2018 profile in The New Yorker. Ghemawat and Dean also became the first-ever level 11 Google engineers, carrying the title of Senior Fellows.
According to Dean’s slide deck, he is the most-cited distributed systems researcher; Ghemawat is the fourth most cited.
Oriol Vinyals: Vinyals, a principal scientist at Google DeepMind, is also joining Discovery Loop.
According to his Google biography, Vinyals focused on machine learning and reinforcement learning. Before joining the team, he worked on projects that fuel tools like Google Translate.
One of his research projects, called AlphaStar, was an agent that bested a top-tier professional StarCraft II player.
Among the most-cited AI researchers, per Dean’s slide deck, Vinyals is sixth.
Quoc Le: Le was a founding member of the Google Brain team. At Stanford, his advisor was Andrew Ng, who helped establish the Brain team.
Le worked on one of Google Brain’s first big projects: developing a neural network of 1,000 machines containing 16,000 processors that demonstrated machine learning by teaching itself how to recognize items after being trained on 10 million images randomly pulled from YouTube videos, as The New York Times reported in 2012.
This being the internet, the system taught itself to recognize cats.
What’s next for Google?
Google is no stranger to big shake-ups, including in AI.
In 2014, the search giant acquired DeepMind, then a startup. Under Google’s banner, DeepMind conducted influential research, including AlphaGo, a program capable of beating a master at the challenging board game Go.
Despite laying the foundation for several AI breakthroughs, Google saw some of its former employees, including Sutskever, push OpenAI to the front of the generative AI race with the release of ChatGPT in 2022.
In 2023, Google merged the Brain and DeepMind teams into one group led by Demis Hassabis.
In addition to Dean’s departure, Google announced that Hassabis would become chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, chief technology officer of Google DeepMind and Google’s chief AI architect, assumed the day-to-day operations of DeepMind and the title of senior vice president.
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