Jeff Dean Leaves Google After 27 Years to Co-Found AI-for-Science Startup Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean, one of the most influential engineers in Google's history, is leaving the company after nearly 27 years. As chief scientist spanning Google DeepMind and Google Research, he helped shape the company's core computing architecture as well as its artificial intelligence programs. His new venture, announced Wednesday, is called Discovery Loop. The company is incorporated as an independent public benefit corporation and aims to use AI to automate scientific and engineering research and experimentation. Dean is founding it with Sanjay Ghemawat, a Google senior fellow and long-time technical collaborator, along with Oriol Vinyals, a vice president at DeepMind, and Quoc Le, a co-founder of Google Brain. Google is not severing ties with its departing researchers: Alphabet is among Discovery Loop's founding investors and Google will act as its cloud partner. The arrangement gives the startup access to compute capacity while keeping an independent legal structure. The announcement landed the same day as the leadership reshuffle at Google DeepMind, where Demis Hassabis gave up the CEO title to become chairman of the unit. Following the pair of announcements, Alphabet shares fell during the trading day. Dean, who earned his computer science Ph.D. at the University of Washington, joined Google in 1999 when the company had roughly 20 employees. His exit, together with three senior researchers, ranks among the most notable talent moves in the AI sector this year.