Article on **Google defectors set up AI-b...

Four senior AI researchers have left Google DeepMind to form Discovery Loop, a Palo Alto-based startup that will build AI systems to automate the experimental loop in scientific discovery, medicine, and engineering. The founders are Jeff Dean, former Google chief scientist, along with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. The four worked together for 14 to 30 years building some of Google's most widely used products, infrastructure, and AI models. Discovery Loop is structured as a public benefit corporation, and the co-lead investors for its initial funding round are Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures. "The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world's most used products, infrastructure and AI models," Dean said in a social media post. "We're excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavour."

Automating the experimental loop

Dean said the general approach is to "automate the experimental loop" across disciplines including scientific discovery, engineering better medicines, and health informatics. The company will start by applying its systems to machine learning research, acting as its own first customer, according to Radical Ventures. "From there, they will direct these systems toward the physical world, targeting grand challenges in engineering, medicine, materials design, and clean energy," the investor said in a blog post. The lab-in-the-loop approach is gaining ground in biopharma R&D, where it is being used to limit the risk of clinical failure in drug discovery by validating targets before candidates enter clinical testing. It's part of a broader push to apply AI to scientific research, a topic covered in our AI for Science & Research section.

DeepMind shakeup

The breakaway comes as Google DeepMind undergoes a leadership change. Demis Hassabis, who won a Nobel Prize for work on protein structure prediction, is stepping down as CEO to become Alphabet's chief scientist, leading the parent company's artificial general intelligence effort, and will remain DeepMind's chairman. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's CTO and Google's chief AI architect, takes on operational leadership as senior vice president. Dean had been leading development of Gemini, whose latest version has been delayed from its original June release. Analysts have suggested the departure of the four researchers could affect Google's AI push, which some see as falling behind rivals Anthropic and OpenAI.

Why this matters for research scientists

Discovery Loop puts serious capital and senior talent behind the idea that AI can run the full experimental cycle - proposing hypotheses, testing them, and iterating. For researchers, that could mean faster discovery cycles in drug development, materials science, and clean energy. The practical question is how to integrate these tools into a research workflow, a topic covered in our AI Learning Path for Research Scientists.