Jeff Dean leaves Google after 27 years to co-found AI science startup Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist for nearly 27 years, is leaving to co-found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that aims to automate scientific experimentation, the company said August 5, 2026.

Dean is not going alone. He is joined by three senior Google researchers — Sanjay Ghemawat, a Google senior fellow; Oriol Vinyals, a vice president of research at Google DeepMind; and Quoc Le, a Google Brain co-founder — in a startup that plans to automate the experimental loop of the scientific method, using frontier AI models to propose, run and learn from experiments at scale. Discovery Loop will start with machine-learning research and engineering before expanding to other areas of science and engineering.

Google is backing the venture as a founding investor and cloud partner, Pichai said in the same blog post that announced a broader Alphabet AI-leadership reshuffle. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co-leading the seed round, which has not closed, with Radical’s Jordan Jacobs joining the board. Neither the round size nor a valuation was disclosed.

The departures strip Google of four founding-era researchers at once. Dean and Ghemawat built much of the company’s early distributed-computing backbone, and Vinyals and Le are among the names behind its deep-learning work. Their exit lands the same day Demis Hassabis moved to chair of Google DeepMind, concentrating leadership churn at the top of Alphabet’s AI effort.

Structuring Discovery Loop as a public benefit corporation ties its charter to a mission beyond profit, a form OpenAI and Anthropic have also used. Whether the startup can build a working system that designs and runs its own experiments remains to be proven.