Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le have left Google to start a new startup named Discovery Loop, a Public Benefit Corporation focused on automating machine learning research and, eventually, science itself. Google is remaining involved as a founding investor and Cloud partner. The four departing employees carry roughly a century of combined Google tenure. Dean stated that the founding team has collaborated for anywhere between 14 and 30 years, depending on the pairing. Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999 and spent over 27 years at the company, eventually rising to Chief Scientist for Google Research and Google DeepMind. He co-designed MapReduce and Bigtable alongside Sanjay Ghemawat, and also worked on Google’s original crawling, indexing, and ad-serving systems. Dean later co-founded Google Brain, oversaw the merger of Brain and DeepMind, and co-led the Gemini project. He has spoken about the origins of Google’s TPUs, which trace back to a speech recognition feature. Sanjay Ghemawat, born in West Lafayette, Indiana, studied at Cornell.