Four Google veterans found Discovery Loop

Discovery Loop aims to automate experimental cycles in machine learning, science, and engineering, with thousands of trials running in parallel.

Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le are leaving Google to create Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on automating research in machine learning, science, and engineering. The four researchers contributed to multiple generations of infrastructure, models, and products developed at Google and Google DeepMind.

The company aims to automate the entire experimental loop: formulating a hypothesis, preparing an experiment, running it, analyzing the results, and refining the approach. Thousands of trials could be conducted in parallel to reduce the time between iterations.

Its initial work will focus on machine learning research. Discovery Loop plans to use its own systems to improve its technology stack before applying them to other fields, including chip design, biology, drug development, and materials science. The founders envision collaboration between researchers and AI systems as a first step, followed by broader automation of experiments.

Google is becoming a founding investor and cloud partner. An agreement is expected to provide computing resources during the company’s first year and support collaboration on machine learning systems and infrastructure. Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures are also participating in the funding round, although the amount raised and the company’s valuation have not been disclosed.

Discovery Loop plans to build a small, in-person team. At the time of its introduction, the company had not yet provided details about its first product, development timeline, or business model.