Jeff Dean leaves Google to co-found Discovery Loop, an AI lab to automate scientific discovery

Google's chief scientist departs after 27 years with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le to build a public benefit corporation that automates the scientific method — reportedly raising $1 billion at a roughly $10 billion valuation.

Jeff Dean — the engineer who spent 27 years building Google's technical core, from its earliest search infrastructure to co-leading its Gemini models — is leaving to co-found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation with a single mission: automate machine learning, science, and engineering so discovery stops running one experiment at a time.

He is not going alone. Longtime collaborators Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le join him, OfficeChai reports. The premise is that the scientific loop — hypothesize, experiment, analyze, repeat — has not fundamentally changed in decades and does not scale when done by hand. Discovery Loop wants to run thousands of iterations in parallel using frontier AI models and large-scale compute, starting with machine learning research before branching toward the National Academy of Engineering's Grand Challenges, from better medicines to affordable solar power.

Investors are reportedly in talks to back the venture with roughly $1 billion at a valuation near $10 billion, people familiar with the matter told Business Insider. Dean announced the launch on X, The Economic Times reported, and Google confirmed it will be a founding investor and Cloud partner, according to OfficeChai. It is the latest — and biggest — exit to hit Google DeepMind, which already lost Transformer co-author Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and AlphaFold creator John Jumper to Anthropic within a single week in June.