# Jeff Dean Leaves Google to Co-Found Discovery Loop AI Automation Startup

> Jeff Dean, one of the most influential engineers of the modern computing era and Google's chief scientist, is leaving the company after 27 years, taking Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals with him. Together, several of them founding members of Google Brain, they are starting a company called Discovery Loop, with Dean as CEO. The pitch is to automate and scale the scientific method itself, using what the founders describe as high-octane algorithms to run and iterate experiments far faster than human researchers can. It is structured as a public benefit corporation, and Google is a founding investor and cloud partner supplying compute for the first year. The move is striking on two levels. It is a serious brain drain from Google's research bench at exactly the moment AI talent is most contested, and it reflects a growing conviction among top researchers that the next big prize is not a better chatbot but AI that accelerates discovery in the physical and biological sciences.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: TechCrunch · Published Saturday, August 15, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Jeff Dean, one of the most influential engineers of the modern computing era and Google's chief scientist, is leaving the company after 27 years, taking Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals with him. Together, several of them founding members of Google Brain, they are starting a company called Discovery Loop, with Dean as CEO. The pitch is to automate and scale the scientific method itself, using what the founders describe as high-octane algorithms to run and iterate experiments far faster than human researchers can. It is structured as a public benefit corporation, and Google is a founding investor and cloud partner supplying compute for the first year. The move is striking on two levels. It is a serious brain drain from Google's research bench at exactly the moment AI talent is most contested, and it reflects a growing conviction among top researchers that the next big prize is not a better chatbot but AI that accelerates discovery in the physical and biological sciences.

## Source

[Read the full story at TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/05/jeff-dean-and-other-top-ai-researchers-are-leaving-google-to-launch-their-own-startup/)

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