Jeff Dean, the chief scientist across Google DeepMind and Google Research who spent nearly three decades shaping the company’s core computing architecture and artificial intelligence programs, is leaving the technology giant to launch a new artificial intelligence venture.
Dean is founding Discovery Loop alongside his longtime technical collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat, a Google Senior Fellow.
Joining the founding team are senior artificial intelligence researchers Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le.
The venture is incorporated as a public benefit corporation focused on using artificial intelligence to automate experimental workflows across science and engineering.
According to the company, its system aims to enable machines to propose, execute, and analyze thousands of experiments in parallel, shortening research cycles that historically depended on sequential human efforts.
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Dean joined Google in 1999 as its 30th employee, when the company operated with 25 employees.
He took to X to express his gratitude towards his 27 years of journey, where he witnessed Google grow into a global enterprise with more than 190,000 employees.
“It has been an absolute pleasure to work with you and to help build some of the most widely used and impactful products of all time,” he wrote.
During their tenure, Dean and Ghemawat co-created foundational distributed systems, including MapReduce and Bigtable, which provided the backend architecture for modern large-scale computing and big data processing.
Dean later helped establish Google Brain and took on leadership roles across Google’s artificial intelligence development, including work on the Gemini model family.
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Discovery Loop however, plans to apply its experimental loops internally to machine learning research before expanding its tools to other scientific disciplines, including biology, drug discovery, material design, and chip architecture.
In a message shared with colleagues on social media, Dean recalled his childhood ambition of building software used by millions, noting that Google currently operates 13 products with over 1 billion active users each.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, also congratulated his long-time colleague and employee for his new start publicly and stated that “Google will support as a founding investor and Cloud partner,” confirming his support. “it’s been a privilege to work with Jeff and Sanjay” he added.