Google's Chief Scientist Jeff Dean Departs to Launch AI Research Automation Venture

Google's Chief Scientist Jeff Dean is leaving the company after nearly three decades to launch a new artificial intelligence venture called Discovery Loop. Alongside his long-time collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat, a Google Senior Fellow, Dean aims to use AI to automate experimental workflows in science and engineering.

Dean joined Google in 1999 as its 30th employee and spent 27 years shaping the company's core computing architecture and artificial intelligence programs. He co-created foundational distributed systems like MapReduce and Bigtable, which provided the backend for large-scale computing and big data processing.

The Discovery Loop system plans to enable machines to propose, execute, and analyze thousands of experiments in parallel, shortening research cycles that historically depended on sequential human efforts. Google will support the venture as a founding investor and Cloud partner, with CEO Sundar Pichai congratulating Dean on his new start.