Google's Chief Scientist is stepping down to launch an AI startup aimed at accelerating scientific discovery
Jeff Dean, a key architect of Google's AI strategy, is leaving the company to launch Discovery Loop. The new startup aims to accelerate scientific discovery by automating complex research and engineering tasks.
Jeff Dean, Google's Chief Scientist, who was one of the company's first employees and is considered the architect of its AI strategy over the past 15 years, is leaving the company. His destination is a new AI startup focused on advancing scientific discovery. Alphabet stock is down more than 3.5% today (Wednesday) on the NASDAQ.
Dean, who joined Google as the company's 30th employee in 1999, will serve as CEO of a new 'public benefit corporation' called Discovery Loop. Its stated goal is to accelerate the pace of technological development by automating complex, multi-stage scientific and engineering tasks.
In the first phase, the company will focus on automating research and engineering processes in machine learning, based on a technological infrastructure it has developed. Later, it plans to apply its technology to a variety of fields, including hardware design, drug discovery, and addressing global challenges such as clean energy.
Joining Dean in the venture are three other Google alumni: Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, and Sanjay Ghemawat. The four were partners in notable breakthroughs in mathematics and protein structure research, and are among the most cited researchers in the world.
"The four of us have been talking about this idea for a while and were excited about it. We believe that by automating many of the classic steps in the experimental cycle, using machine learning models that extend the capabilities of scientists and engineers, we can enable the exploration of a wider range of scientific fields and accelerate the pace of discovery," Dean said.
According to Dean, the scientific process consists of formulating an experimental idea, setting it up, executing it, and evaluating the results. "In many fields, you can computerize this entire cycle," he said, noting that this was the inspiration for the company's name.
Alphabet will provide Discovery Loop with cloud services and computing resources, and is also one of the venture's investors. Venture capital firms Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co-leading the seed funding round. The company declined to disclose the valuation at which it is raising funds.
The four founders have known each other for over a decade. Quoc Le was a co-author and leader in the development of Google's AI systems, which won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Sanjay Ghemawat, also one of Google's first employees, partnered with Dean to develop the company's distributed computing systems in the early 2000s, and in 2012, the two were awarded a prize by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in recognition of their scientific contributions.
