Today we are announcing our co-lead investment in Discovery Loop, a public benefit company founded by Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, legends in the field of artificial intelligence.
Radical Ventures was founded on the thesis that AI will both replace traditional software and unlock progress in science and engineering. Such transformative progress will improve lives and mark an extraordinary moment in human history that will be remembered for centuries.
The scientific method is arguably the most powerful algorithm humanity has ever invented. The problem is that, to date, we have executed the process manually: we propose ideas, run experiments, observe outcomes, refine protocols, and repeat. This loop is sequential and slow.
Discovery Loop is focused on automating this process. Instead of humans running experiments in series, the Discovery Loop team is building AI systems that run thousands of experiments in parallel. The AI proposes the experiment, conducts the run, learns from the result, and iterates recursively. Jeff, Sanjay, Quoc and Oriol are starting by automating machine learning research, acting as their own first customer. From there, they will direct these systems toward the physical world, targeting grand challenges in engineering, medicine, materials design, and clean energy.
It is impossible to describe Discovery Loop’s founding team without sounding hyperbolic, so it is best to acknowledge what they have already done. Jeff, Sanjay, Quoc, and Oriol helped build the hardware and software upon which the modern world – billions of people and businesses – relies, including Google Search, TPUs (Google’s proprietary chips), MapReduce, TensorFlow, AlphaFold, and Google’s GenAI platform, Gemini. Among them are three of the most-cited AI researchers and two of the most-cited distributed systems researchers.
Jeff, the CEO of Discovery Loop, is widely considered the greatest software engineer of all time, a designation that does not even begin to cover his accomplishments as longtime leader of Google Brain and, more recently, Google’s Chief Scientist and co-lead (with Oriol) of Gemini.
Sanjay is viewed as one of the most brilliant distributed systems architects in history. He was a Google Senior Fellow and the co-creator of the foundational infrastructure of the internet, including the Google File System, Bigtable, and Spanner.
Quoc is a pioneer of modern deep learning, recognized globally for his instrumental role in establishing Google Brain and for co-inventing (with Ilya Sutskever and Oriol) sequence-to-sequence learning, the critical breakthrough that paved the way for neural machine translation and today’s large language models.
Oriol is recognized as one of the most versatile and impactful AI researchers in the world, having driven milestone after milestone as a defining research leader at DeepMind, including his pioneering work on AlphaStar, and, most recently, co-leading (with Jeff) the Gemini program.
Backing founders of this caliber, we have conviction not only in their ability to innovate and push the frontier but also their expertise in building systems of massive scale and leading the highest-performing teams.
Automating the scientific method will require developing and deploying state-of-the-art models on the largest of distributed computing infrastructure. This team possesses rare, full-stack depth that spans silicon, foundation models, and products that touch the lives of billions. Having built the modern AI stack, this team is now turning their attention to the mechanics of discovery itself. We couldn’t be more excited to help Jeff, Sanjay, Quoc, Oriol and the team fulfill their mission.
Discovery Loop is building an in-person team in Palo Alto. If you want to join the team and help build the engine for scientific discovery, please visit www.discoveryloop.com.
Radical Reads is edited by Ebin Tomy (Analyst, Radical Ventures)
