Jeff Dean leaves Google after 27 years to found Discovery Loop with three pillars of in-house search

The thirtieth Google employee is leaving with Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals to set up a public interest company that wants to automate the experimental loop of scientific research.

Jeff Dean, who joined Google in 1999 as the thirtieth employee and architect of much of Gemini's search infrastructure and multimodal models, is leaving the company. The announcement, made on August 5, 2026, is accompanied by three other major departures: Sanjay Ghemawat, senior fellow and one of the company's most influential engineers, Quoc Le, founding member of Google Brain, and Oriol Vinyals, senior researcher at Google DeepMind.

Their new structure is called Discovery Loop and Dean takes over the management. The stated goal is not to compete with consumer assistants but to apply a significant scale of calculation to the complete automation of experimental loops: formulate hypotheses, launch experiments, evaluate the results, start again. The bet is that the speed of iteration will become the limiting factor of scientific discovery, and that an AI will be able to loosen it.

Discovery Loop is adopting the status of a public interest corporation rather than a traditional startup. The seed round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital in the round — as well as Alphabet, which is supporting the departure of its own researchers rather than opposing it.