Google Invests in Startup Founded by Its Own Top AI Researchers

On August 5, Google announced the departure of four key employees: Jeff Dean, chief scientist, after 27 years, along with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, who are founding a new company called Discovery Loop. Rather than losing them, Google is becoming a founding investor and cloud partner, providing compute power for at least the first year. Dean, a Google veteran since 1999 and co-creator of MapReduce and Bigtable, will be CEO. Ghemawat co-created MapReduce and Bigtable, Le is a co-founder of Google Brain and creator of AutoML-Zero, and Vinyals is a technical lead on Gemini. The startup aims to automate the entire experimental cycle in AI research, focusing on recursive self-improvement, with plans to eventually apply it to hardware design, drugs, and clean energy. The funding round is led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Kleinen Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital participating. Alphabet also provides cloud and compute, raising concerns about circular financing. The departures follow a broader trend of AI talent leaving Google, including Nobel laureate John Jumper and colleagues from DeepMind, and the cancellation of the AlphaFold team. Alphabet shares fell nearly 5% on the announcement. Skeptics point out that previous AI-driven materials discovery efforts have not produced strong results, and the automated cycle may accelerate experiments but not necessarily lead to discoveries. The success of the venture will be measured by results in self-optimization and the nature of the collaboration with Google.