Analysis
Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist and its 30th-ever employee, left the company this week after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop, an AI research startup aimed at automating scientific and engineering discovery, according to TechTimes and Yahoo Finance. He's joined by longtime collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat, Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le and former Gemini technical lead Oriol Vinyals -- four of the most senior research names Google has had.
This is the piece of this week's DeepMind reshuffle that hadn't been fully priced in yet: Google isn't just losing Dean to a rival, it's backing him as a founding investor, serving as Discovery Loop's cloud partner, and supplying compute for the startup's first year. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co-leading a seed round that hasn't closed and hasn't disclosed a valuation.
“Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co-leading a seed round that hasn't closed and hasn't disclosed a valuation.”
Discovery Loop is structured as a public benefit corporation and plans to start by automating machine-learning research and engineering itself before expanding into hardware design, drug discovery and clean-energy research -- essentially building AI systems meant to accelerate the process of AI research. Google keeping a formal relationship with the company it just lost four senior researchers to is an unusual arrangement: it turns a competitive loss into a strategic bet, but it also means Google's compute and cloud infrastructure will be helping build whatever eventually competes with DeepMind's own research agenda.