Four top AI figures from Google DeepMind—Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le—have left to form Discovery Loop, a Palo Alto-based start-up dedicated to speeding up research across life sciences and other industries. The company aims to build "AI solutions that can automatically solve important problems in machine learning, science, and engineering," with Dean stating the general approach is to "automate the experimental loop" in disciplines including scientific discovery, engineering better medicines, and health informatics. The four have worked together for 14 to 30 years. The lab-in-the-loop approach is gaining traction in biopharma R&D to minimise the risk of clinical failure by ensuring targets are robustly validated before clinical testing. Discovery Loop is structured as a public benefit corporation, and its co-lead investors for its initial funding round are Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Radical Ventures noted the founders are starting by automating machine learning research, acting as their own first customer, before directing systems toward challenges in engineering, medicine, materials design, and clean energy. The breakaway comes as Google DeepMind undergoes a major shake-up, with suggestions its AI push around Gemini is falling behind rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI. Dean was leading Gemini development, which has seen a delay in the launch of its latest incarnation originally due in June. Nobel Prize winner Demis Hassabis is relinquishing the chief executive role to become parent company Alphabet's chief scientist.