Google’s Longtime AI Strategist Leaving to Launch Own Company

Longtime Google AI expert Jeff Dean is reportedly leaving to start his own company.

As the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Wednesday (Aug. 5), Dean is one of the tech giants earliest employees — joining the company in 1999 as its 30th hire — and has spent the last 15 years helping shape its artificial intelligence (AI) strategy.

Dean will serve as CEO of the new company, a public-benefit corporation dubbed “Discovery Loop,” whose mission, per its website, is “automating discovery to accelerate science and engineering for the world.”

He is joined by three other Google veterans: Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat, who have driven high-profile advances in mathematics and protein structure and are among the most cited researchers in the world, the WSJ said.

“The four of us have been chatting about this a little bit and we got excited,” Dean said in an interview with the WSJ. “We think by automating many of the classical experimental-loop aspects with machine learning models, augmenting human scientists and engineers, we’ll be able to make it possible to explore more space in broad science areas to accelerate discovery.”

Google is providing cloud and computing capacity to Discovery Loop and is also an investor in the company, the report said. However, the scientists told the WSJ they decided they needed to leave the larger company to pursue their new mission.

“We wanted to build something differently than how things are built at Google right now,” Ghemawat said.

He argued that Google’s infrastructure is good for larger consumer apps and ad systems and search but has “very different requirements than the type of infrastructure we want to build for research.”

The WSJ notes that Dean is among several AI leaders to have left Google in recent months. Noam Shazeer, Character.AI co-founder and co-author of the famous 2017 transformer paper that helped usher in the current AI revolution, stepped down to take a job with OpenAI.

And John Jumper, a Nobel Prize-winning Google DeepMind artificial intelligence scientist, announced in June he was leaving the company for Anthropic.

Last week, the Financial Times reported that DeepMind had disbanded the team behind its Nobel Prize-winning Alpha Fold AI system as part of an overhaul of its research strategy.

Google last month reported quarterly earnings that showed demand from enterprise customers for computing capacity, Gemini models and AI applications had helped drive an 82% increase in Google Cloud revenue and pushed Cloud backlog to $514 billion.