Discovery Loop wants to advance the pace of scientific discovery using AI to address issues across domains.

Chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving Google after a 27 year-long stint to start a new company called Discovery Loop that wants to accelerate research using AI.

Alphabet and Radical Ventures are backing the business as founding investors alongside funding from Khosla Ventures.

The founding team at Discovery Loop also includes Dean’s other departing colleagues; senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, research vice-president at DeepMind Oriol Vinyals and research scientist Quoc Le.

Together, they have helped develop multiple generations of core Google products, including Search, Ads, Translate, Tensor Processing Units, DeepMind’s life sciences model AlphaFold and Gemini AI among several more technologies, and represent three of the most-cited AI researchers.

The four want to begin by focusing on automating the process of machine learning (ML) research and engineering. “Historically, scientific progress has relied on these sequential human iterations. In many domains, this process remains incredibly slow and labour-intensive,” Discovery Loop’s website reads.

“By advancing the pace at which we conduct engineering and scientific discovery, we can bring the benefits of science and technology to the world much faster.

“Ultimately, our goal is to build AI systems that act as a deeply positive, empowering force for humanity, delivering technology solutions that improve people’s lives on a global scale.”

It plans to experiment the technology on its own systems before expanding into other scientific domains, with the hopes of developing AI systems capable of drug development or addressing environmental crises.

“Jeff and Sanjay helped to drive some of the most significant technology transitions, from our early search infrastructure to the neural networks that helped create the modern AI era,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

“We’ll continue to work with them as a founding investor and cloud partner, and collaborate on a research framework for ML systems and related infrastructure advances.” Alphabet stocks dipped more than 4pc at market close yesterday (5 August).

The departures mark a continuation of a years-long shakeup in the tech industry, with top minds from Meta, Amazon, Apple, Arm, and more, exchanging hands or launching their own R&D-focused AI ventures.

For Google, the latest exits comes after parent company Alphabet posted a better-than-expected revenue of $119.8bn driven by an 82pc growth in its cloud business.

The company’s big budget expenses seem to be working, according to Pichai, who told investors at last month’s earnings call that 90pc of Fortune 100 companies use Gemini Enterprise. The Gemini App now has more than 950m monthly users.

The company announced a further $15bn in capital expenditures for the year on the heels of its successful quarter. CNBC reported that Google is investing more than almost any company in the world in data centres, chips and related infrastructure.

Alphabet had initially announced a 2026 capex of up to $185bn, doubling expenses since last year to meet customer demand. This number was revised to $190 in April, before estimations were further raised to now hit $205bn.

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