The startup idea that convinced a UW computer science legend to leave Google after 27 years

Speaking in June at the University of Washington Allen School commencement, AI pioneer Jeff Dean told computer science graduates how he “got the itch to join a startup in 1999,” landing at Google when it had a grand total of 20 people above what is now a T-Mobile store in Palo Alto.

Twenty-seven years later, now 58, the UW alum has the itch again.

Google announced Wednesday that Dean, its chief scientist, is leaving with three colleagues to launch Discovery Loop, a startup built to automate the experimental loop in scientific research: proposing experiments, running them, evaluating results, and iterating, thousands of times over.

“Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today,” they write on their website.

Discovery Loop is based in Palo Alto, with what it describes as a lean team of its own. Joining Dean are Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, his collaborator of more than two decades; Google DeepMind research VP Oriol Vinyals; and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le.

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Google is a founding investor and will supply computing power for at least the first year. Discovery Loop is structured as a public benefit corporation, with backing from Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures (a name Seahawks fans will recognize from the team’s incoming ownership group).

The departures came as part of a broader shakeup announced in a memo from CEO Sundar Pichai. Demis Hassabis is handing off day-to-day leadership of Google DeepMind to become its chair and Alphabet’s chief scientist, while CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu steps up as SVP, overseeing Gemini model development. Alphabet shares fell about 4% after the announcement

“After an incredible 27-year run, Jeff Dean is at a moment where he wants to try something new, and we’re excited to support him in that,” Pichai wrote.

Dean, who earned his UW computer science Ph.D. in 1996, gave no hint of his plans at the Allen School commencement. He told Wired the idea came together only in recent weeks.

But the general theme was there. Listing problems he thought worth solving, he pointed the UW graduates toward “developing tools that accelerate scientific discovery and engineering.”

“One of the beauties of software,” he said during his commencement address, “is that small groups of people can build things that have enormous impact in the world.”

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