Jeff Dean Starts Discovery Loop to Accelerate AI-Driven Science
Jeff Dean, one of the most influential and longest-serving leaders at Google, is leaving the tech giant to start his own AI company.
Joining him as co-founders are several leading researchers from the company, including Sanjay Ghemawat, a senior fellow and top engineer at Google; Quoc Le, a pivotal AI researcher and founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Dean is said to intend to take on the role of CEO.
The team is launching Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation aimed at leveraging AI to accelerate scientific research.
Discovery Loop announces its intention to employ advanced algorithms to launch and refine thousands of experiments at once, aiming to automate parts of the research process and broaden the scope of experimentation.
The startup aims to leverage AI for generating more advanced AI (a method referred to as recursive self-improvement), thereby eliminating human involvement in the process completely.
“Although science and engineering have greatly progressed society over the centuries, advancements have typically depended on gradual, sequential human processes, resulting in a notable bottleneck,” as per the company.
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Discovery Loop is creating sophisticated AI technologies that utilize enormous computational capacity to drastically change the pace and effectiveness of innovation by automating entire experimental cycles.
Leveraging AI to speed up scientific discovery has been a major focus of the science and technology sectors for many years, yet until lately, it was primarily an experimental domain with restricted commercial use.
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The firm has obtained financial backing from several varied sources, including Alphabet, Google's parent organization. The company announced Wednesday that Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures are co-leading the initial funding round. Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital were involved as well.
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"The upcoming significant frontier for AI is to move past merely responding to inquiries and start making discoveries," stated the founding team in a unified announcement. "By significantly speeding up the processes of engineering and scientific exploration, we can provide the advantages of groundbreaking technologies to the world much more quickly."