Google传奇工程师Jeff Dean在任职近27年后，与长期合作伙伴Sanjay Ghemawat及另外两位顶尖AI科学家Oriol Vinyals和Quoc Le共同离开Google，创办了一家名为Discovery Loop的新公司。Dean在Y Combinator的Startup School活动上向6,000名创业者发表演说时，暗示了他对「自动化科学方法」的兴趣——透过AI自动提出实验、执行实验、评估结果，并在数千次回圈中实现突破性进展。这四位共同创办人不仅是长年同事，更是私交甚笃的好友，他们在短短数周内便决定携手创业。

Discovery Loop的核心理念是将AI从辅助研究的工具，转变为能够自主进行科学与工程研究的「研究者」。公司计划首先将自动化实验回圈应用于改进自身的机器学习演算法，再将这些改良后的AI系统推广至晶片设计、生物学、药物开发及材料设计等多个领域。共同创办人Quoc Le对自动化机器学习的前景尤为兴奋，认为有可能因此发现全新的Transformer架构。团队的终极目标是深度自动化整个发现流程，让少数人即可借助Discovery Loop的技术，超越全球最大研究机构的创新能力。

在融资方面，团队以简单的简报向创投募资，获得了Khosla Ventures和Radical Ventures等机构的投资，具体金额和估值未公开。知名创投家Vinod Khosla表示，凭这个团队的阵容，甚至不需要知道他们要做什么就愿意投资。离开Google的谈判过程较为艰难，Alphabet执行长Sundar Pichai曾多次试图挽留。最终Google不仅给予祝福，还进行了投资并承诺提供第一年的算力支持。目前Discovery Loop尚未开始招聘或租用办公空间，Dean略显腼腆地确认自己将担任执行长。

Jeff Dean, a legendary Google engineer of nearly 27 years, has departed the company along with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le to co-found Discovery Loop, a startup focused on automating the scientific method using AI. Dean hinted at his vision during a talk at Y Combinator's Startup School, describing a system that could autonomously propose experiments, execute them, evaluate results, and iterate thousands of times to achieve breakthroughs. The four co-founders, who are both longtime colleagues and close friends, conceived the idea just weeks before the announcement and quickly aligned around the shared conviction that AI is ready to automate scientific and engineering discovery loops.

Discovery Loop plans to be its own first customer, initially directing its automated experiment loops toward improving its own machine learning algorithms. The enhanced software will then serve as the foundation for tackling challenges in chip design, biology, drug discovery, and materials science. Co-founder Quoc Le expressed particular excitement about the possibility of discovering entirely new transformer architectures through automated ML research. The team's long-term ambition is to deeply automate the process of generating and testing new ideas, potentially enabling small teams to out-innovate the world's largest research organizations by leveraging Discovery Loop's technology.

The startup secured funding from Khosla Ventures, Radical Ventures, and several other firms, though the founders declined to disclose the amount or valuation. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who met the team secretly on a Saturday to avoid tipping off the market, called them the ultimate superstar team and praised their vision of making AI the researcher rather than merely a research tool. Negotiating their departure from Google proved difficult, with CEO Sundar Pichai making multiple attempts to retain them, but Google ultimately invested in Discovery Loop and agreed to provide cloud computing resources for the first year. The company, structured as a public benefit corporation, has yet to hire staff or secure office space, and Dean confirmed—somewhat sheepishly—that he will serve as CEO.