Jeff Dean's Startup Deck Leaks, Featuring Yang Zhilin; Silicon Valley VCs Rush to Fund

Jeff Dean's startup Discovery Loop, co-founded with Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, and Sanjay Ghemawat, has released a pitch deck that stands out for its simplicity, containing only three main pages: what they built together, the teams they led, and their academic impact, plus a page of personal photos. The deck lists their achievements including Google Search, Gmail, Gemini, TensorFlow, and AlphaFold, and highlights that they have collectively managed teams of up to 4,400 people. It also showcases the AI leaders they mentored, such as Dario Amodei, Ilya Sutskever, and Yang Zhilin, who worked with Quoc Le at Google Brain and later founded Moonshot AI. The company's mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering through an automated experimentation loop, initially focusing on ML research and engineering. Confirmed investors include Khosla Ventures, Radical Ventures, Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital, with Alphabet also investing and signing a long-term cloud computing deal. The funding amount is rumored to be in the hundreds of millions, though not officially confirmed. Vinod Khosla expressed being honored to lead the round, comparing it to investing in OpenAI in 2018.