Dean and Ghemawat launch Discovery Loop
On 5 August 2026 Google said that Jeff Dean, after 27 years at the company, and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are launching an independent public benefit corporation to accelerate discovery in machine learning, science and engineering; Google remains a founding investor and Cloud partner. Discovery Loop's own page names four founders, Dean, Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals, and the aim of automating the experimental loops of science.
Why it matters
People who built Google's search infrastructure and neural networks are creating a company whose aim is to automate the loop of hypothesis, experiment and conclusion itself, starting with machine learning research. So far it is a statement of intent: the documents name no products, results or measurements.
What Google says. In Pichai's message: Dean 'wants to try something new', he and Ghemawat are launching 'an independent public benefit corporation' to 'accelerate discoveries in ML, science, and engineering'; Google will work with them as a founding investor and Cloud partner and collaborate on a research framework for ML systems and related infrastructure advances. Le and Vinyals are not named in the message. What Discovery Loop's page says. The team: Dean, Ghemawat, Le, Vinyals. The approach: automate whole experimental loops, proposing an experiment, running it, evaluating and iterating, using frontier AI models and large-scale computing, running thousands of experiments in parallel. First automating machine learning research and engineering, with the company as its own first customer; later the US National Academy of Engineering's Grand Challenges. The team is to be small and in person. What the record does not claim. No document names investors, an amount, the legal form or jurisdiction, a chief executive, the day of incorporation, products, results or timelines. Google's message names Dean and Ghemawat as the ones launching the company; whether Le and Vinyals also left Google, the documents do not say. Discovery Loop's page was read on 10 October 2026 and how it looked on 5 August is not known. Press reports of funding rounds, investors and titles were not used.