I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, we are founding Discovery Loop, a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world's most used products, infrastructure and AI models, and we're excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavor.

Discovery Loop mission statement: Our mission is straightforward: we are building AI solutions that can automatically solve important problems in machine learning, science, and engineering. By advancing the pace at which we conduct engineering and scientific discovery, we can bring the benefits of science and technology to the world much faster. Ultimately, our goal is to build AI systems that act as a deeply positive, empowering force for humanity, delivering technology solutions that improve people’s lives on a global scale.

Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach is broadly applicable across many different fields of science and engineering. We'll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important subproblems in nearly every one of the fourteen NAE Grand Challenge problems. We think doing this well requires strong expertise in machine learning as well as large-scale systems.

Pitch deck slide, “Common Cycle in many Disciplines”: the universal loop of science and engineering is propose experiment, implement and run, evaluate. Our approach is to automate the loop: drive down iteration time, propose and automatically run many experiments, learn from each evaluation to get better experiments, and scale quality and volume of experiments to reach breakthrough results.
Pitch deck slide, “Mission: Automate ML, science, and engineering for impactful problems”: our approach applies across virtually every domain of science and engineering, including the majority of the 14 U.S. National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenge problems.

We created a pitch deck to tell a handful of VC firms about us and what we were up to. Here's a few slides about our background and some of the things we've worked on from the pitch deck (it was fun putting together the list of people in our teams who have gone on to found a whole range of exciting companies). We are delighted to have selected Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures to lead our initial funding round, along with participation from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, Doerr Capital, and Alphabet.

Pitch deck slide, “Strong Expertise in AI and Systems”: Google Scholar lists of the most-cited AI researchers and the most-cited distributed systems researchers, with Jeff Dean, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals (AI) and Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat (distributed systems) highlighted.
Pitch deck slide, “Co-Founders: Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals”, listing the products, infrastructure, AI research and AI applications the co-founders have been involved in creating.
Pitch deck slide on the co-founders' management and team-building experience, including a list of recent AI founders who worked on their teams.

Our immediate order of business is to hire an amazing founding team. We want to create an awesome environment with a great culture of technical excellence, teamwork, respect, and ambition. We'll also start building our infrastructure and AI models and systems to tackle our first domain: automating large-scale experimentation for ML research and engineering. In doing so, we're going to be our own first customers. The rapid feedback from doing that is the way to build something amazing.

Ok, one more fun slide from our pitch deck.

A collage of photos of the co-founders working and traveling together in London, Patagonia, Vietnam, and California.

– Jeff on behalf of the Discovery Loop co-founders (Jeff, Sanjay, Quoc and Oriol)