On July 25, legendary Google engineer Jeff Dean revealed his newest venture: Discovery Loop, a startup focused on automating the scientific and engineering processes. With Dean at the helm, along with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le—top AI scientists from DeepMind and Google Brain—the project aims to create an automated version of the scientific method, potentially unlocking groundbreaking advances in fields such as chip design and drug discovery.

Dean, a co-founder of Google Brain and chief scientist at Google DeepMind, spoke to 6,000 startup founders about choosing projects that are both exciting and beneficial. His own area of interest is clear: Discovery Loop will use machine learning algorithms to run thousands of automated experiments, improving AI models in the process.

Despite Google’s stake in the new venture, the move represents a significant departure for Dean after almost 27 years. He explains that the idea emerged only a few weeks ago as they saw the potential for AI to automate scientific and engineering loops. The company plans to use its own development as a test bed before expanding into other domains.

The team hopes to out-invent large research organizations, with dedicated individuals potentially using Discovery Loop to achieve superhuman advances. For now, their ideas will be codeveloped with humans but the ultimate goal is deep automation. Initial funding came from leading VCs, including Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures, recognizing the potential of this 'ultimate superstar team'.