Google AI leaders Dean, Ghemawat leave to launch Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le announced on August 5, 2026, that they are leaving Google to launch Discovery Loop, a startup aiming to automate the scientific method. The departures deal a blow to Google’s AI ambitions.

Dean, a nearly 27-year Google veteran, and Ghemawat were among the company’s first hires. Vinyals is a vice president of research at DeepMind and technical lead for Gemini, and Le co-founded Google Brain and was the key scientist behind AutoML-Zero. The four are long-time colleagues and friends who vacation together.

Discovery Loop plans to be its own first customer, using autonomous experiment loops to refine its machine learning algorithms. “I’m very excited about automating machine learning,” Le said in an interview just before the launch. He hopes the system will discover new transformer architectures. The startup then aims to apply the technology to domains such as drug discovery, material design, and chip design.

The idea came together only a few weeks ago, Dean said. The team created a simple pitch deck and approached venture capitalists. Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, who met with them on a Saturday to avoid leaks, called the group “the ultimate superstar team.” Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures invested, with Radical managing partner Jordan Jacobs joining the board. The funding amount and valuation were not disclosed.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai held multiple meetings to try to retain the researchers, but they wanted the freedom of a startup. Google ultimately blessed the departure, making an investment and providing a one-year compute-power arrangement. “We’ll continue to work with Discovery Loop as a founding investor and Cloud partner,” Pichai said in a statement.

The founders have not yet hired a staff or rented offices. Dean will serve as CEO. “I think I’m the CEO,” he said. “Everyone pointed at me.”

The startup’s mission to automate discovery echoes ambitions voiced by many AI leaders. For Discovery Loop, success will hinge on whether its breakthroughs outweigh the talent it drew from Google.