4 of Google's Top AI Brains Are Leaving-and Launching Their Own AI Startup

Four of Google's top artificial intelligence researchers are leaving the company to launch a startup called Discovery Loop, the founders said in interviews published Tuesday. Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le announced their departure after nearly 27 years at Google to pursue automated scientific research loops, the company said. Dean, a Google senior fellow and chief scientist of Google DeepMind, said the idea emerged only weeks ago among the longtime colleagues and friends. The quartet includes Ghemawat, a senior fellow; Vinyals, a DeepMind vice president of research and Gemini technical lead; and Le, a Google Brain cofounder and key scientist behind AutoML-Zero. They plan to build AI systems that automate experimentation loops across domains such as chip design, biology and drug discovery. The founders have secured backing from Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures, among others, and structured the company as a public benefit corporation. Google will retain a stake in Discovery Loop and provide compute power for the first year, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement. Pichai praised the departing engineers for driving significant technology transitions over nearly three decades. Dean said he will serve as chief executive, though the team has not yet begun hiring or secured office space. The researchers said they wanted the freedom to make radical changes without the inertia of a large organization.