Jeff Dean, one of the longest-serving and most influential executives at Google, is stepping down from the search giant to launch his own AI startup.<\/p>\n
Coming with him as co-founders are several other top researchers at the company, including Sanjay Ghemawat, a top engineer and senior fellow at Google; Quoc Le, a key AI researcher and founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Dean reportedly<\/a> plans to serve as CEO.<\/p>\n Together, the group is starting Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that seeks to use AI to turbo-charge scientific research. <\/p>\n Discovery Loop says it plans to use high-octane algorithms to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments simultaneously, with the goal of partially automating the research process and expanding the scale at which experimentation can be conducted.<\/p>\n The startup is also interested in using AI to help create more powerful AI (a process known as recursive self-improvement<\/a>), which would cut human iteration out of the loop entirely.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile science and engineering have tremendously advanced society over past centuries, progress has traditionally relied on slow, sequential human iterations, creating a significant bottleneck,\u201d the company said in a press release. \u201cDiscovery Loop is developing advanced AI systems that leverage massive computational scale to fundamentally transform the speed and efficiency of innovation by automating complete experimental loops.\u201d<\/p>\n Using AI to accelerate scientific discovery has been a key interest<\/a> of the science and tech communities for many years, but until recently, it remained a largely experimental field with limited commercial application.<\/p>\n The company has received financial support from a number of different sources, including Google\u2019s parent company Alphabet. The initial funding round is being co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, the company announced Wednesday. Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital also participated.<\/p>\n \u201cThe next great frontier for AI is to go beyond answering questions and to begin making discoveries,\u201d the founding team said in a joint statement. \u201cBy fundamentally accelerating how engineering and scientific discovery are conducted, we can deliver the benefits of transformative technologies to the world far sooner.\u201d<\/p>\n Dean has worked at Google since 1999 and was Google\u2019s 30th employee. Over the years, he has contributed to Google search\u2019s core infrastructure<\/a>, including its crawling and indexing system and its query-serving system. He has also had a significant impact on Google Gemini\u2019s multimodal models<\/a> and played a leading role in the company\u2019s early AI research.<\/p>\n \u201cWe think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop,\u201d Dean told the New York Times<\/a>. \u201cYou will get both a higher quantity and a higher quality of experiments, and that will lead to scientific breakthroughs and advances.\u201d<\/p>\n