Four Google AI pioneers quit to launch start-up Discovery Loop
What's the story
Four of Google's leading artificial intelligence (AI) experts, including Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, have left the tech giant to start their own company. The new venture, called Discovery Loop, will focus on using AI for breakthroughs in various fields such as drug discovery and chip design. The team also includes Oriol Vinyals, VP of research at DeepMind and a technical lead for Gemini, and Quoc Le, a co-founder of Google Brain.
Startup goals
Goal is to create automated version of scientific methods
Discovery Loop plans to leverage advanced algorithms to run thousands of simultaneous experiments, aiming to partially automate research and dramatically expand the scale of scientific testing
Dean believes that running thousands of these automated loops could lead to major breakthroughs in various fields, including science and biology.
The team plans to use their own company as a testbed for the autonomous experiment loops they develop, which will first be used to improve the company's advanced machine learning algorithms.
Goal
Build AI that can make discoveries
Once the machine learning algorithms are improved, they will be used in an AI system to solve problems in other fields.
The team hopes to make superhuman advances in areas such as chip design, biology, drug discovery, and material design.
"The next great frontier for AI is to go beyond answering questions and to begin making discoveries," the founding team said in a joint statement.