**[Four Google Veterans Team Up to Launch a Startup, Aiming to Let AI Run Scientific Experiments on Its Own]** According to monitoring by Beating, former Alphabet Chief Scientist Jeff Dean has left Google after nearly 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop alongside Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. The four founders have backgrounds spanning Google's foundational systems, Google Brain, Gemini, and AlphaFold, among other core projects. Discovery Loop plans to start with machine learning research. Researchers will pose questions, and AI will write code, run experiments, analyze results, and then plan the next round of attempts accordingly. Tasks that previously required researchers to manually iterate can now execute thousands of experiments simultaneously, with humans primarily responsible for setting goals and evaluating outcomes. The team will first test the system on themselves, using it to improve models and technical architectures. If the approach proves effective, they plan to expand its application to areas such as chip design, biological research, new drug development, and new materials. The company has yet to establish an office and is currently recruiting its founding team, with the product still in its early stages. Discovery Loop has already secured seed funding at its inception. Alphabet is the founding investor and will also provide first-year computing power through Google Cloud. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co-leading the investment round, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and other firms. The funding amount and valuation have not yet been disclosed, and the seed round is still ongoing. [Original Link]