Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup
Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup
Jeff Dean 等多位顶级 AI 研究员离开 Google，创办自己的初创公司
Jeff Dean, one of the longest-serving and most influential executives at Google, is stepping down from the search giant to launch his own AI startup. Coming with him as co-founders are several other top researchers at the company, including Sanjay Ghemawat, a top engineer and senior fellow at Google; Quoc Le, a key AI researcher and founding member of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Dean reportedly plans to serve as CEO.
Jeff Dean 是 Google 任职时间最长且最具影响力的管理人员之一，他即将离开这家搜索巨头，创办自己的 AI 初创公司。与他一同作为联合创始人离开的还有公司内部的其他几位顶级研究员，包括 Google 顶级工程师兼高级研究员 Sanjay Ghemawat、Google Brain 核心 AI 研究员及创始成员 Quoc Le，以及 Google DeepMind 高级研究科学家 Oriol Vinyals。据报道，Dean 计划担任首席执行官。
Together, the group is starting Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that seeks to use AI to turbo-charge scientific research. Discovery Loop says it plans to use high-octane algorithms to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments simultaneously, with the goal of partially automating the research process and expanding the scale at which experimentation can be conducted.
该团队共同创立了 Discovery Loop，这是一家旨在利用 AI 加速科学研究的公益性公司。Discovery Loop 表示，计划利用高性能算法同时启动并迭代数千项实验，目标是实现研究过程的部分自动化，并扩大实验开展的规模。
The startup is also interested in using AI to help create more powerful AI (a process known as recursive self-improvement), which would cut human iteration out of the loop entirely. “While science and engineering have tremendously advanced society over past centuries, progress has traditionally relied on slow, sequential human iterations, creating a significant bottleneck,” the company said in a press release. “Discovery Loop is developing advanced AI systems that leverage massive computational scale to fundamentally transform the speed and efficiency of innovation by automating complete experimental loops.”
该初创公司还致力于利用 AI 来帮助创造更强大的 AI（这一过程被称为“递归自我改进”），从而将人类从迭代循环中完全剔除。公司在新闻稿中表示：“尽管科学和工程学在过去几个世纪极大地推动了社会进步，但这种进步传统上依赖于缓慢的、顺序性的人类迭代，这造成了巨大的瓶颈。Discovery Loop 正在开发先进的 AI 系统，利用大规模计算能力，通过自动化完整的实验循环，从根本上改变创新的速度和效率。”
Using AI to accelerate scientific discovery has been a key interest of the science and tech communities for many years, but until recently, it remained a largely experimental field with limited commercial application. The company has received financial support from a number of different sources, including Google’s parent company Alphabet. The initial funding round is being co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, the company announced Wednesday. Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital also participated.
利用 AI 加速科学发现多年来一直是科技界关注的重点，但直到最近，它仍主要是一个实验性领域，商业应用有限。该公司已获得包括 Google 母公司 Alphabet 在内的多个来源的资金支持。公司周三宣布，首轮融资由 Radical Ventures 和 Khosla Ventures 共同领投，Kleiner Perkins、Lightspeed 和 Doerr Capital 也参与了投资。
“The next great frontier for AI is to go beyond answering questions and to begin making discoveries,” the founding team said in a joint statement. “By fundamentally accelerating how engineering and scientific discovery are conducted, we can deliver the benefits of transformative technologies to the world far sooner.”
创始团队在联合声明中表示：“AI 的下一个伟大前沿领域是超越回答问题，开始进行科学发现。通过从根本上加速工程和科学发现的进行方式，我们可以更快地将变革性技术带来的益处带给世界。”
Dean has worked at Google since 1999 and was Google’s 30th employee. Over the years, he has contributed to Google search’s core infrastructure, including its crawling and indexing system and its query-serving system. He has also had a significant impact on Google Gemini’s multimodal models and played a leading role in the company’s early AI research.
Dean 自 1999 年起就在 Google 工作，是 Google 的第 30 号员工。多年来，他为 Google 搜索的核心基础设施做出了贡献，包括其抓取和索引系统以及查询服务系统。他还对 Google Gemini 的多模态模型产生了重大影响，并在公司早期的 AI 研究中发挥了领导作用。
“We think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop,” Dean told the New York Times. “You will get both a higher quantity and a higher quality of experiments, and that will lead to scientific breakthroughs and advances.”
“我们认为，AI 有机会更全面地自动化那些传统上非常依赖人力的实验循环，”Dean 在接受《纽约时报》采访时表示，“你将获得数量更多、质量更高的实验，这将带来科学上的突破和进步。”