Four Top Google Scientists Leave to Launch New AI Startup

Four of Google’s top AI researchers are leaving to start their own company, and Google is backing them on the way out. Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist and a 27-year veteran of the company, is joining Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le to found Discovery Loop, according to Wired. Google is taking a stake in the startup and will provide cloud compute for its first year.

The goal is to automate scientific discovery itself. Propose an experiment, run it, evaluate the results, then repeat, thousands of times over, across fields like drug discovery, chip design and material science.

Dean didn’t exactly hide his intentions to leave Google. Weeks before announcing the company, he described the exact concept to 6,000 aspiring founders at Y Combinator’s Startup School, without mentioning it was already his own secret startup.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai tried to talk the group into staying, but ultimately gave the exit his blessing.

Jonathan Small • Founder, Strike Fire Productions