On August 5, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals left Google and launched Discovery Loop - a public benefit corporation, with a mission to automate research cycles in frontier science. The departure was announced in the same letter from Sundar Pichai that put Koray Kavukcuoglu in charge of Gemini.
- On August 5, Jeff Dean (27 years at Google), Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals left Google and founded Discovery Loop.
- The company is a Public Benefit Corporation. Their mission, verbatim from the site: "Automatically solve important problems in machine learning, science, and engineering."
- Dean's departure was announced in the same letter from Pichai that put Kavukcuoglu in charge of Gemini - both stories come out of the same event.
We wrote that Discovery Loop is incorporated in Delaware. That isn't in any official source (Sundar Pichai's letter and Discovery Loop's site), only in TechCrunch. 'Delaware' was removed and Google's letter is now the primary source. The conclusion doesn't change.
27 years in the same place is a career, not a job. Jeff Dean closed it in a single day and opened a company with four names and one mission sentence.
Automatically solve important problems is a sentence that doesn't specify which problem, with what money, and in how much time. That's exactly why it's a good mission for a website and a weak basis for a verdict today.
"Experimental loop" sounds abstract, but the craft underneath is familiar - a scientist forms a hypothesis, runs an experiment, reads the result, adjusts the next step. Discovery Loop is betting that a frontier model can run this cycle on its own, faster than a lab full of people.
Public Benefit Corporation sounds noble on paper. In practice it just means their charter allows decisions in favor of the mission, not only profit. Whether they actually do it gets checked by results, not by a founding document.
On the ground
Discovery Loop has no product to show yet. It has four names that carry weight in the industry, public benefit corporation status, and one mission sentence. I'll check back after the first result, not before.