Jeff Dean is leaving Google after nearly 27 years. The former Alphabet chief scientist is launching a new startup called Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le — three fellow Google veterans whose combined résumés span low-level systems, Google Brain, Gemini, and AlphaFold.
The goal: let AI run scientific research on its own. Discovery Loop is starting with machine learning research. A researcher poses a question; the AI writes the code, runs experiments, analyzes the results, and decides what to try next. It's the kind of cycle that, until now, required a researcher to repeat manually, looping through code and results by hand.