Jeff Dean Launches Discovery Loop After 27 Years at Google

Jeff Dean, who spent 27 years at Google, announced a new 10-person company called Discovery Loop at the Asian American Scholar Forum's Frontier & Pioneer Symposium, moderated by Dawn Song. He is joined by co-founders Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le — collaborators he has worked with for 14 to 30 years and who together built MapReduce, Bigtable, Spanner, and TensorFlow.
The company's pitch is to compress the propose-build-test loop scientists already run, cutting one iteration from a day or a week down to a minute or an hour, then running thousands of experiments in parallel and feeding the results back into what to try next.
Discovery Loop is structured as a public benefit corporation. Dean said the goal is to distribute discoveries widely, and that the company may make decisions against its own financial interest to do so.