Discovery Loop
AI research startup automating the full scientific experimental loop
“The seed round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital participating. Alphabet is a founding investor.”
“Jeff Dean — Google employee #30, co-creator of foundational Google infrastructure (MapReduce, TensorFlow), former head of Google Brain and Google Research/AI (~4,400 person org); now CEO of Discovery Loop”
“Sanjay Ghemawat — Google Senior Fellow; co-creator of MapReduce, Google File System, Bigtable, and Spanner; Dean's collaborator for over two decades”
“Quoc Le — Google Brain founding member; co-inventor of sequence-to-sequence learning alongside Ilya Sutskever and Oriol Vinyals”
“Oriol Vinyals — Former DeepMind VP of Research; Gemini technical co-lead; creator of AlphaStar; over 100,000 academic citations”
“The company is Discovery Loop, a Delaware public benefit corporation in Palo Alto. Dean is CEO. The mission fits in a sentence: automate the experimental loop itself.”
“Alphabet is a founding investor, and is supplying the compute for at least the first year.”
“Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today. — Discovery Loop founding deck”
“California bans non-competes. Anthropic, SSI, Thinking Machines, and now Discovery Loop all exist partly because their founders could walk out on a Wednesday and incorporate on a Thursday.”
“Discovery Loop says its goal is to 'automate the experimental loops of science and engineering.'”
“Discovery Loop is the biggest AI spinout of the cycle; raised 'hundreds of millions' in first-round funding from top-tier VCs; represents a major competitive threat to Alphabet”
“Four of Google's most senior AI researchers — including a 27-year veteran and the co-founder of Google Brain — have departed to launch Discovery Loop, underscoring that Alphabet has lost its pole position in AI and is hemorrhaging the talent that built its advantage.”
“Vinod Khosla tweeted the impact 'could be larger than the impact that Google had when we backed them in 1998 at Kleiner.'”
Source→“Chief scientist Jeff Dean, a 27-year Google veteran, is leaving to launch Discovery Loop.”
Source→“He's being joined by Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, DeepMind vice president Oriol Vinyals, and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le.”
“He's being joined by Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, DeepMind vice president Oriol Vinyals, and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le.”
“He's being joined by Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, DeepMind vice president Oriol Vinyals, and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le.”
AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.