Google defectors set up AI-based scientific method company
The Discovery Loop team are Oriol Vinyals, Sanjay Ghemawat, Jeff Dean and Quoc Le.
A quartet of top AI figures at Google DeepMind have left to form their own start-up – Discovery Loop – dedicated to speeding up research across life sciences and other industries.
Former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean – along with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le – has formed Discovery Loop to build "AI solutions that can automatically solve important problems in machine learning, science, and engineering."
In a social media post, Dean said that the general approach is to "automate the experimental loop" in a wide range of disciplines, including scientific discovery, engineering better medicines, and health informatics.
"The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world's most used products, infrastructure and AI models," he added. "We're excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavour."
The lab-in-the-loop approach is gaining traction at a phenomenal pace in biopharma R&D, where it is being deployed to minimise the risk of clinical failure in new drug discovery projects by ensuring targets are robustly validated, even before any candidates directed against them start clinical testing.
For now, it's not clear how Discovery Loop's take on this will differ from other players in the category, which include tech giants like NVIDIA, Amazon, and Google's own Isomorphic Labs, along with smaller outfits such as Recursion Pharma, Protillion Bio, and Relation Therapeutics.
The Palo Alto-based start-up is structured as a public benefit corporation, a for-profit model that comes with a legal requirement to balance financial returns for shareholders with a specific public or social benefit. The co-lead investors for its initial funding round are Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures.
"Jeff, Sanjay, Quoc and Oriol are starting by automating machine learning research, acting as their own first customer," commented Radical Ventures in a blog post.
"From there, they will direct these systems toward the physical world, targeting grand challenges in engineering, medicine, materials design, and clean energy," it added. "Backing founders of this calibre, we have conviction not only in their ability to innovate and push the frontier but also their expertise in building systems of massive scale and leading the highest-performing teams."
All change at DeepMind
The breakaway comes as Google DeepMind is in the throes of a major shake-up, and suggestions that its AI push, built around its Gemini platform, is falling behind some of its rivals in the category like Anthropic and OpenAI.
Dean was leading development of Gemini, which has seen a delay in the launch of its latest incarnation that was originally due in June, and analysts have suggested that the departure of all four figures to Discovery Loop could have a major impact on its AI drive.
Nobel Prize winner Demis Hassabis is relinquishing the chief executive role to become parent company Alphabet's chief scientist – a new role with responsibility to lead its artificial general intelligence (AGI) effort – and DeepMind's chairman.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's chief technology officer and Google's chief AI architect, is taking on the operational responsibilities at the unit with the title of senior vice president.
