Vietnamese AI Leader Lê Viết Quốc Launches Discovery Loop Startup with Google Veterans

AI researcher Lê Viết Quốc, a senior scientist at Google and co‑founder of Google Brain, left the company on 5 August to co‑found Discovery Loop, a public‑benefit corporation aimed at automating machine‑learning, engineering and scientific research. The venture’s founding team also includes Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat and Oriol Vinyals, all long‑time Google AI pioneers.

Discovery Loop secured seed financing from Alphabet, the parent of Google, alongside venture firms Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed and Doerr Capital. The startup’s mission is to build AI systems that can accelerate and automate key stages of scientific experimentation, reducing the time required for new discoveries.

The formation of the company reflects a broader shift of top AI talent moving into independent ventures, and investors are betting heavily on the potential of AI‑driven research automation.