Jeff Dean, the search giant’s longtime AI lead and one of its most accomplished engineers, will be CEO of Discovery Loop. Toronto-headquartered Radical and Bay Area firm Khosla Ventures co-led a round of undisclosed size, with participation from other venture firms as well as Alphabet, Google’s parent company. (The Logic)

Talking point: Discovery Loop plans to apply the AI that its four co-founders have helped invent to the process of scientific inquiry and advancement, starting with machine learning itself. They’re betting that the technology can automate, and thus speed up, the work of coming up with theories and then running experiments to prove them out. The firm will be a public benefit corporation, meaning it can consider societal interests beyond shareholder returns. In addition to Dean, the initial team includes Sanjay Ghemawat, with whom he rewired Google’s search infrastructure; Gemini technical lead Oriol Vinyals; and Quoc Le, a key figure at Google’s former Brain AI unit. Together, they “built the modern AI stack” Radical’s Jordan Jacobs and Aaron Rosenberg wrote in a post. Meanwhile, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is moving to chair and taking Dean’s role as Alphabet’s chief scientist. 

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