This week we announced Radical Ventures’ co-lead investment in Discovery Loop, founded by Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals — perhaps the most pedigreed AI founding team ever. For this week’s feature, we’re sharing excerpts from Jeff Dean’s thread announcing the new company, including some of the slides the team presented to Radical just a few weeks back. — Jordan Jacobs

1/ Announcing Discovery Loop! 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.

2/ 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. Doing this well requires strong expertise in machine learning as well as large-scale systems.

3/ We created a pitch deck to tell a handful of VC firms about us and what we were up to. Here are a few slides about our background and some of the things we’ve worked on. 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 (John Doerr), and Alphabet (Google). We’ll be working with them to close our seed round over the next few weeks.

4/ Our immediate order of business is to find office space and hire an amazing founding team over the next few weeks. 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, 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. And we’re hiring! See discoveryloop.com.

5/ One more fun slide from our pitch deck.