Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup

After 26 years at Google, Jeff Dean is walking out the door — and taking some of the company's sharpest AI minds with him. Dean, employee number 30 and one of the architects behind Google's search infrastructure and much of Gemini's multimodal work, is founding a new startup called Discovery Loop. He's bringing Sanjay Ghemawat, a longtime Google senior fellow, Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain, and Oriol Vinyals of DeepMind along as co-founders. Dean will run the show as CEO.

The pitch is bold: use AI not just to answer questions, but to actually run science. Discovery Loop wants to fire off thousands of experiments at once, using algorithms to design, execute, and iterate on research loops that would normally take human scientists months or years to grind through. The company argues that progress has always been throttled by slow, sequential human effort, and that automating the experimental cycle itself — not just parts of it — is the real unlock. There's also a more provocative angle buried in the plan: using AI to build better AI, cutting humans out of that particular loop too, a concept researchers call recursive self-improvement.

Money is already flowing in. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co-leading the funding round, with Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital also chipping in. Oddly enough, so is Alphabet — Google's own parent company is backing a startup built around the sudden departure of some of its most senior AI talent. Discovery Loop is structured as a public benefit corporation, a legal setup meant to signal that its mission isn't purely about returns.

Dean told the New York Times he expects the shift to produce both more experiments and better ones, calling it a path toward genuine scientific breakthroughs rather than incremental tweaks. It's a familiar promise in AI circles, but coming from someone who helped build Google's core systems and shaped its AI research from the inside, it carries a bit more weight than the usual founder talk. Whether Discovery Loop actually accelerates science or just accelerates funding rounds remains to be seen, but the exodus itself says something about how restless even Google's top brass have gotten.