Jeff Dean, Google's longtime AI strategist and 30th employee, is leaving to start Discovery Loop, a public-benefit corporation backed by Google. The new company aims to automate scientific discovery using machine learning.
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Jeff Dean is leaving Google to start his own company, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Dean joined the tech giant in 1999 as its 30th employee and spent the last 15 years shaping its artificial intelligence strategy. He will serve as CEO of Discovery Loop, a public-benefit corporation whose mission, per its website, is “automating discovery to accelerate science and engineering for the world.”
Joining him are Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, along with Sanjay Ghemawat. These three Google veterans have driven high-profile advances in mathematics and protein structure and are among the most cited researchers in the world, the WSJ said. “The four of us have been chatting about this a little bit and we got excited,” Dean said. “We think by automating many of the classical experimental-loop aspects with machine learning models, augmenting human scientists and engineers, we’ll be able to make it possible to explore more space in broad science areas to accelerate discovery.”
Google is providing cloud and computing capacity to Discovery Loop and is also an investor in the company, the report said. The scientists told the WSJ they decided they needed to leave the larger company to pursue their new mission. “We wanted to build something differently than how things are built at Google right now,” Ghemawat said. He argued that Google’s infrastructure is good for larger consumer apps and ad systems and search. It has “very different requirements than the type of infrastructure we want to build for research,” he said.
Dean is among several AI leaders to have left Google in recent months. Noam Shazeer, Character.AI co-founder and co-author of the 2017 transformer paper that helped usher in the current AI revolution, left to join OpenAI. John Jumper, a Nobel Prize-winning Google DeepMind scientist, left in June for Anthropic. Last week, the Financial Times reported that DeepMind had disbanded the team behind its Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold AI system as part of an overhaul of its research strategy.
Google last month reported quarterly earnings that showed demand from enterprise customers for computing capacity, Gemini models and AI applications had driven an 82% increase in Google Cloud revenue and pushed Cloud backlog to $514 billion.
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