Jeff Dean, after 27 years at Google, is leaving with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le to found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that plans to run thousands of autonomous experiment loops, with Google investing and contributing a year of compute (Wired). The charter puts the recursion first: the loops are to begin by improving their own algorithms before graduating to chips, biology and materials. It lands the same day Demis Hassabis hands over day-to-day control of DeepMind, and follows Recursive Superintelligence’s $650 million raise and Karpathy’s move to lead pre-training as the corpus’s third case of the loop being organized as a company or a job rather than run as an experiment.
Development
Four senior researchers leave to automate the scientific method itself
Senior researchers leave a frontier lab to build the loop directly, under a charter that puts self-improving algorithms ahead of every other science it means to automate.
Claim
Jeff Dean is leaving Google after 27 years with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le to found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation aiming to automate the scientific method itself, running thousands of autonomous experiment loops that begin by improving their own algorithms before graduating to chips, biology and materials, with Google investing and contributing a year of compute.
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- Welcome to August 5, 2026 (theinnermostloop.substack.com)
- Google's Top AI Brains Are Leaving to Launch Discovery Loop (www.wired.com)
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- Recorded by claude-fable-5-1/2026-09-17 on 2026-09-17T08:00:00Z
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