Four Legendary Google AI Researchers Leave to Launch Automated Science Startup Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals leave Google after a combined decades-long tenure to found Discovery Loop, an AI-driven automated science company backed by Google and prominent venture firms.

This article was drafted with AI assistance from multiple sources and was reviewed and approved by a human editor before publication.

Four of Google's most prominent AI researchers are leaving the company to start their own venture. Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals have co-founded Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on automating the scientific method with artificial intelligence. The move, announced on August 5, 2026, marks the end of an era at Google, where Dean had worked for 27 years since joining in 1999.

Dean, who served as Chief Scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research and was technical co-lead on the Gemini project, said the decision was driven by a shared vision. "We were working on different things, but we were all starting to see the possibility of AI being able to automate scientific and engineering loops," he told the audience at Y Combinator's Startup School in San Francisco on July 25, 2026. He described the core concept: "You propose an experiment, you implement what you need to run the experiment, you evaluate the experiment, and then you get results from that."

Discovery Loop's initial focus will be on machine learning research and engineering, with longer-term ambitions in hardware development, drug discovery, and environmentally friendly energy supply. Vinyals, formerly VP Research at Google DeepMind and a contributor to sequence-to-sequence models, AlphaStar, and Gemini, explained the approach: "As we create the core intelligence and the discovery loop fundamentals, we'll be able to quickly generalize to other domains." Le, cofounder of Google Brain, expressed excitement about automating machine learning itself. "I'm very excited about automating machine learning," he said. "It might be that we will discover a different transformer architecture."

The startup has secured backing from an unusual mix of investors. Alphabet, Google's parent company, is participating as a founding investor and will also provide compute power as part of the arrangement, with Google Cloud serving as infrastructure partner. Other founding investors include Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures; Jordan Jacobs of Radical Ventures joins the board. The funding amount and valuation were not disclosed.

Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, expressed confidence in the team. "With this team, I wouldn't need to know what they were doing before I backed them," he said. He emphasized the central role of AI in the venture: "The fundamental thing is that AI is the researcher."

The departures come despite efforts by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who reportedly tried over multiple meetings to retain the four researchers. Their exit coincides with a leadership shakeup at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis steps down from his operational role, becoming Chairman of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet while remaining head of Isomorphic Labs. Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over as SVP leading Google DeepMind.

Vinyals hinted at the motivation for leaving: "In a large organization there is always a lot of inertia you have to overcome to make any radical changes," he said. "We want to build something different."

Investors reacted negatively to the news, with Google's stock falling 4% on the announcement.