Jeff Dean, one of Google's longest-serving and most influential executives, is leaving the company to launch an AI startup called Discovery Loop, taking several senior Google researchers with him as co-founders. The move represents a significant departure of top AI talent from Google, with Dean set to serve as CEO of the new public benefit corporation, which aims to use AI to dramatically accelerate scientific research and experimentation.

Joining Dean are Sanjay Ghemawat, a senior fellow at Google; Quoc Le, a founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Discovery Loop plans to run thousands of experiments simultaneously using AI, partially automating research and potentially applying the technology to improve AI systems themselves. The startup's initial funding round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, Doerr Capital and, notably, Google's parent company Alphabet. Dean, who joined Google in 1999 as its 30th employee, helped build core search infrastructure and later contributed significantly to Google Gemini's development.