Jeff Dean leaving Google after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop

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Dean is departing alongside three other Google veterans to build an AI-for-science startup backed by Google as an investor and cloud partner

Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images

Jeff Dean is leaving Google $GOOGL after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop, an independent public benefit corporation focused on using AI to automate scientific and engineering research, the company said Wednesday. Google will serve as a founding investor and cloud partner in the new venture.

The three others making the leap with Dean are Sanjay Ghemawat, a Google senior fellow, Oriol Vinyals, who served as a vice president at DeepMind, and Quoc Le, one of Google Brain's co-founders, according to the Wall Street Journal. At launch, the company intends to tackle automation of machine-learning research and engineering, before eventually branching out into areas such as hardware design, drug discovery, and clean energy challenges, the Journal said. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co-leading the seed round, though the round is not closed and the startup declined to disclose its valuation.