Jeff Dean Leaves Google to Automate the Scientific Method With Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist, is leaving the company after nearly 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop, a startup aiming to automate the experimental loops of scientific research, the company announced on August 5, 2026. Google confirmed it will back the new venture as a founding investor and Cloud partner. Three other senior Google AI figures are co-founding the company with Dean: Sanjay Ghemawat, a Google Senior Fellow; Oriol Vinyals, VP of research at Google DeepMind; and Quoc Le, a co-founder of Google Brain. The company is incorporated as a public benefit corporation with a mission to build systems that can run the full experimental loop of the scientific method at a scale and speed that sequential human effort cannot match. The founders plan to run thousands of such loops in parallel, initially focused on machine learning research before expanding into domains including chip design, biology, drug discovery, and materials science. The departure comes amid a broader reorganization of Google's AI leadership. DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis is stepping back from day-to-day leadership to become chair and Alphabet's chief scientist, while Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over as SVP of Google DeepMind. Google will supply compute power for the venture's first year and collaborate on a research framework for ML systems and infrastructure. Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures are among the backers, with Radical managing partner Jordan Jacobs joining the board.