Jeff Dean and 3 Core AI Leaders Leave Google to Launch Science Automation Startup

SumitGup · x · 2026-08-06

Four key figures who built Google Brain and Gemini — Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le — are leaving to start Discovery Loop, a startup focused on automating scientific discovery from hypothesis generation to experimentation.

Notably, Google is a founding investor, and Google Cloud will provide the compute. The thread also recalls how Google built a ChatGPT-style bot a year earlier but leadership killed it over fears of cannibalizing search and accuracy issues.

Related event: Google AI Chief Jeff Dean Leaves to Found New Startup(107 posts)→

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