Jeff Dean will leave Google, where he has worked since 1999, to lead a startup focused on applying artificial intelligence to scientific research. The information was published by Business Insider this Friday (7). The new company, called Discovery Loop, also brings together other researchers linked to Google and DeepMind.
Dean is expected to take on the role of CEO of the company. Among the co-founders are Sanjay Ghemawat, an engineer and senior fellow at Google; Quoc Le, an AI researcher and one of the founding members of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior researcher at Google DeepMind.
Discovery Loop was structured as a public benefit corporation, a corporate model that allows combining commercial objectives with a public benefit mission.
AI to expand the scale of experiments
The project aims to develop systems capable of initiating, monitoring and repeating thousands of experiments simultaneously. The proposal is to automate parts of the scientific process and reduce the time needed between hypotheses, tests and new research cycles.
“While science and engineering have promoted enormous advances for society over the past centuries, progress has traditionally depended on slow, sequential human iterations, creating a significant bottleneck,” the company said in a statement.
“Discovery Loop is developing advanced AI systems that use an enormous computational scale to fundamentally transform the speed and efficiency of innovation through the automation of complete experimental cycles.”
The company also plans to study the use of artificial intelligence in developing new AI systems. The approach includes recursive improvement processes, in which models can contribute to the development and testing of later versions with less human intervention.
Dean told the New York Times that automation can allow more experiments to be carried out and improve the quality of tests.
“We believe there is an opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been an experimental cycle that requires a lot of human involvement,” Dean said. “You will have a greater quantity and also a greater quality of experiments, and that will lead to scientific discoveries and advances.”
Alphabet participates in the funding
Discovery Loop’s initial funding round is led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is also participating in the investment, according to the announcement released by the company on Wednesday (5).
Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed and Doerr Capital complete the list of investors mentioned. The amount raised was not disclosed in the reference text.
“The next great frontier of AI is going beyond answering questions and starting to make discoveries,” the founding group said in a joint statement.
“By fundamentally accelerating the way engineering and scientific discoveries are conducted, we can bring the benefits of transformative technologies to the world much earlier.”
Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999
Dean joined Google in 1999 as the company’s 30th employee. During his tenure, he participated in the development of components of the search infrastructure, including crawling, indexing and query processing systems.
In recent years, the executive also worked on the company’s artificial intelligence projects, including early research in the area and the development of the multimodal models in the Gemini family.
