Jeff Dean, Google’s longest-serving executive and 30th employee, is stepping down to launch Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on accelerating scientific research using AI.

He is joined by co-founders Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, all top researchers at Google.

The startup aims to use high-octane algorithms to automate experimental loops, initiating and iterating thousands of experiments simultaneously, with the goal of partially automating the research process.

It also plans to explore recursive self-improvement, using AI to create more powerful AI.

The initial funding round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital, including support from Alphabet.

Dean’s background includes contributions to Google search infrastructure and leading roles in early AI research, including Google Gemini’s multimodal models.

‘We think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop,’ Dean told the New York Times.