Google's Jeff Dean leaves for Discovery Loop — and aims to automate science itself

jeff dean, the chief scientist of google deepmind and technical lead on gemini, has departed google alongside co-founder sanjay ghemawat, vp of research oriol vinyals, and google brain co-founder quoc le to launch discovery loop. the startup aims to build ai systems that automate the scientific method—proposing, implementing, and evaluating thousands of experiments—to accelerate breakthroughs in biology, drug discovery, and chip architecture. while google will take a stake in the venture, the loss of these four key architects of its infrastructure and ai strategy represents a significant brain drain and a shift toward autonomous agent development. discovery loop plans to use these autonomous loops to discover new transformer architectures and generalize ai improvements across multiple technical domains.