Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat launch AI startup Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean, former chief scientist at Google, and long-time collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat are departing the company to launch a new artificial intelligence startup named Discovery Loop. The venture is reportedly seeking a $1 billion funding round at a valuation of approximately $10 billion, according to reports from Business Insider.

Discovery Loop is being structured as a public-benefit corporation with the goal of using AI to accelerate scientific and engineering discovery. The company aims to automate machine-learning research and engineering, with potential long-term applications in hardware design, drug discovery, and clean energy. The founding team includes other prominent researchers such as Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals.

Dean and Ghemawat were instrumental in building the foundations of the modern internet and Google’s infrastructure. Their previous work includes developing distributed computing systems like MapReduce, BigTable, and Spanner, as well as pioneering the Google Brain project, which was central to the development of large language models.