Google's AI Geniuses Leave the Company
Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le have joined forces to create a system that automates the scientific method, backed by both VC funds and Google itself.
Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le have joined forces to create a system that automates the scientific method, backed by both VC funds and Google itself.
After nearly 27 years, legendary engineer Jeff Dean is leaving Google. He's not going alone-joining him are Sanjay Ghemawat, one of the company's first employees, and top AI scientists Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le. Together, on August 5, 2026, they officially announced the founding of a new company, Discovery Loop, with the ambitious goal of creating artificial intelligence that can independently conduct scientific research.
The news, reported by TechCrunch and Wired, is a major blow to Google at a time when the race to develop AI models is fiercely competitive. Wired compares the departure of Dean and Ghemawat, who wrote significant parts of Google's computing and search infrastructure, to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards leaving the Rolling Stones to start a new band.
Although the official announcement came in early August, hints were visible earlier. As early as July 25, 2026, speaking before 6,000 potential founders at Y Combinator's "Startup School" at the Chase Center in San Francisco, Dean shared his enthusiasm for the idea of an automated scientific method. "You propose an experiment, implement what you need to run it, evaluate the experiment, and then you get results," Dean explained then, unaware that he was describing to the audience exactly what he had already secretly started working on.
The idea, Dean says in an interview with Wired, came together just a few weeks before the announcement. He was quickly joined by longtime colleagues and friends with whom he also shares personal vacations. "We were working on different things, but we all started seeing the possibility that AI could automate scientific and engineering loops," said Dean, who will take on the role of CEO at the new company. "I think I'm the CEO. Everyone pointed their finger at me," he added with a smile.
Discovery Loop sets itself a clear but extremely complex goal: first, it will direct automated experiment loops toward improving its own advanced machine learning algorithms. That improved software will then become the core of an AI system capable of solving problems in various other domains. "I'm very excited about automating machine learning," said Quoc Le, the key scientist behind Google's AutoML-Zero project. "It's possible we'll discover a different transformer architecture."
Long-term, ambitions range from chip design, biology, and drug discovery to materials design. Oriol Vinyals, vice president of research at DeepMind, highlights the key challenge: "As we create foundational intelligence and the basics of discovery loops, we'll quickly be able to generalize to other domains. One of the things we'll obviously focus on is how these models come up with new ideas to try. That's not currently their strong suit."
Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, whose fund Khosla Ventures invested in the company, summarized the fundamental difference in approach: "People have used AI for research, not to make AI the researcher. The fundamental thing [at Discovery Loop] is that AI is the researcher." He held the meeting with the founders in his office on Sand Hill Road on a Saturday, so no one would suspect Google's impending loss. "With this team, I shouldn't need to know what they're doing to support them. This is the ultimate superstar team," he added.
The negotiations to leave Google were, according to Dean, painful. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai tried to convince them to stay over multiple meetings. Nevertheless, the founders decided they wanted the freedom and excitement of running a startup. "In a large organization, there's always a lot of inertia you have to overcome to make radical changes. We want to build something different," Vinyals explained.
Google ultimately gave its blessing, along with an investment and an agreement to provide computing power in the first year. "Over 27 years, Jeff and Sanjay helped drive some of the most significant technology transitions, from our early search infrastructure to the neural networks that helped create the modern AI era," read Pichai's statement. "We will continue to work with Discovery Loop as a founding investor and Cloud partner."
In addition to Khosla Ventures, the startup also received investment from the AI-focused VC fund Radical Ventures, whose managing partner Jordan Jacobs will join the board of directors. "Building something that will solve all these problems is a powerful idea. These people have done this kind of work in the past, so they know what they're doing," said Jacobs. The investment amount and valuation were not disclosed, but Wired notes that some companies pay tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars for a single AI superstar.
Discovery Loop has not yet started hiring a team or leasing office space. Their mission is not entirely new-almost every major figure in AI has claimed that AI would become the engine of scientific discovery. Still, this team is betting that they have the knowledge and skills to build a system that will actually achieve such discoveries.
