Google Loses Jeff Dean, Three AI Stars to Discovery Loop
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- Jeff Dean is leaving Google after almost 27 years, departing alongside Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le to found a startup called Discovery Loop, with Dean serving as CEO
- Discovery Loop will run thousands of automated experiment loops directed first at improving the company's own machine learning algorithms, then generalizing to chip design, biology, drug discovery, and material design
- Google is taking a founding stake in Discovery Loop and will provide compute power for the first year; Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai held multiple meetings trying to keep the team
- Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures led the funding round, with Vinod Khosla calling it 'the ultimate superstar team'; the startup is structured as a public benefit corporation
- The cofounders formed the company weeks before launch and had not yet hired staff or rented office space at the time of the announcement, raising the prospect of further defections from Google
Why it matters: Google is losing four of its most senior AI researchers — including the cofounder of Google Brain and a DeepMind VP — at the moment the company is scrambling to keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic, and the founders' choice to automate the scientific method mirrors pitches from Dario, Sam, and Jensen. By taking an equity stake and providing compute, Google is converting a talent hemorrhage into a structured partnership rather than a clean break.
