Google’s Top AI Brains Are Leaving to Launch Discovery Loop
Google’s Top AI Brains Are Leaving to Launch Discovery Loop
谷歌顶级 AI 大脑离职，创办 Discovery Loop
On July 25, Jeff Dean spoke to 6,000 would-be founders at Y Combinator’s Startup School at San Francisco’s Chase Center. Dean is a legendary engineer at Google. He is cofounder of Google Brain, chief scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research, and technical colead on the company’s flagship AI model Gemini. With his frequent collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat, he’s written significant parts of the company’s computing and search infrastructure. A running joke in geekdom is a list of surreal “facts” about his technical prowess: Jeff Dean’s resume lists the things he hasn’t done; it’s shorter that way. At Chase Center, the interviewer asked him what areas startup founders should think about tackling.
7 月 25 日，Jeff Dean 在旧金山大通中心（Chase Center）举行的 Y Combinator 创业学校活动上，向 6000 名准创业者发表了演讲。Dean 是谷歌的传奇工程师，他是 Google Brain 的联合创始人、Google DeepMind 和 Google Research 的首席科学家，也是谷歌旗舰 AI 模型 Gemini 的技术联席负责人。他与长期合作伙伴 Sanjay Ghemawat 一起，编写了谷歌计算和搜索基础设施的重要部分。极客圈里流传着一个关于他技术实力的超现实“事实”清单：Jeff Dean 的简历上列出的都是他“没做过”的事，因为这样写更短。在大通中心，采访者问他创业者应该考虑解决哪些领域的问题。
Dean said that the most important thing would be to pick something you’re excited about and would be useful in the world. He then shared his own interest: an automated version of the scientific method. “You propose an experiment, you implement what you need to run the experiment, you evaluate the experiment, and then you get results from that,” he said. Dean said that running thousands of those automated loops could unlock groundbreaking advances in multiple domains like science, biology, chip design, and even making improved AI models.
Dean 表示，最重要的事情是选择一件你感到兴奋且对世界有用的事情。随后，他分享了自己的兴趣所在：自动化版本的科学方法。“你提出一个实验，实现运行实验所需的内容，评估实验，然后从中获得结果，”他说。Dean 认为，运行数千个这样的自动化循环，可以在科学、生物学、芯片设计甚至改进 AI 模型等多个领域开启突破性进展。
Unbeknownst to the crowd, Dean was talking about his own secret startup, which he had just organized. Today it’s official: After almost 27 years, Dean is leaving Google, along with Ghemawat and two other top-tier AI scientists, to found a company called Discovery Loop.
当时观众并不知道，Dean 谈论的正是他刚刚筹备的秘密创业项目。今天，消息正式公布：在效力近 27 年后，Dean 将与 Ghemawat 以及另外两位顶级 AI 科学家一起离开谷歌，创办一家名为 Discovery Loop 的公司。
Even though Google will take a stake in the new company, it’s a devastating blow to the search giant as it attempts to keep pace in the frantic AI model competition. It’s bad enough that Dean and Ghemawat, who were among the company’s first hires, are leaving—that’s like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards ditching the Rolling Stones to start a new band. Worse, the other cofounders are also supernovas in the AI firmament: Oriol Vinyals, VP of research at DeepMind and a technical lead for Gemini, and Quoc Le, a cofounder of Google Brain and the key scientist behind Google’s AutoML-Zero, a project that uses machine learning algorithms to autonomously build AI products.
尽管谷歌将持有这家新公司的股份，但对于这家正试图在激烈的 AI 模型竞争中保持领先地位的搜索巨头来说，这无疑是一个沉重的打击。Dean 和 Ghemawat 作为谷歌的首批员工离职已经够糟糕了——这就像 Mick Jagger 和 Keith Richards 离开滚石乐队去组建新乐队一样。更糟糕的是，其他联合创始人也是 AI 领域的超级明星：DeepMind 研究副总裁兼 Gemini 技术负责人 Oriol Vinyals，以及 Google Brain 联合创始人、谷歌 AutoML-Zero 项目背后的关键科学家 Quoc Le（该项目利用机器学习算法自主构建 AI 产品）。
In an interview I did with the cofounders just before launch, Dean tells me the idea came up only a few weeks ago. He was quickly joined by the other three, who are not only long-time colleagues but friends who vacation together. “We were working on different things, but we were all starting to see the possibility of AI being able to automate scientific and engineering loops,” he says.
在发布前我与几位联合创始人的采访中，Dean 告诉我，这个想法仅仅是在几周前才产生的。另外三位成员很快加入了他的行列，他们不仅是长期同事，还是经常一起度假的朋友。“我们当时在做不同的事情，但我们都开始看到 AI 能够自动化科学和工程循环的可能性，”他说。
The quartet worked up a road map wherein Discovery Loop would be its own first customer. The autonomous experiment loops they create initially will be directed towards improving the company’s advanced machine learning algorithms. That improved software will then become the core of an AI system that can tackle problems in subsequent domains. “I’m very excited about automating machine learning,” says Le. “It might be that we will discover a different transformer architecture.”
这四人制定了一份路线图，其中 Discovery Loop 将成为自己的第一个客户。他们最初创建的自主实验循环将致力于改进公司先进的机器学习算法。这些改进后的软件将成为 AI 系统的核心，从而解决后续领域的问题。“我对自动化机器学习感到非常兴奋，”Le 说，“我们或许能发现一种不同的 Transformer 架构。”
From there, Discovery Loop will set out to make superhuman advances in a variety of fields, including chip design, biology, drug discovery, and material design. “As we create the core intelligence and the discovery loop fundamentals, we’ll be able to quickly generalize to other domains,” says Vinyals. “One of the things that we’ll be obviously very focused on is how these models come up with new ideas to try. That’s not something that currently they’re super strong at.”
此后，Discovery Loop 将着手在芯片设计、生物学、药物发现和材料设计等多个领域取得超越人类的进展。“当我们创建了核心智能和发现循环的基础后，我们将能够迅速推广到其他领域，”Vinyals 说，“我们显然会非常关注的一个重点是，这些模型如何提出新的尝试想法。这并不是它们目前特别擅长的事情。”
At first, the team envisions that those ideas will be codeveloped with humans, but their goal is deeply automating the process. If it works out, they contend, it’s possible that a few dedicated individuals may use Discovery Loop to out-invent the world’s largest research organizations. Presumably those small teams will be customers of Discovery Loop. (The startup also may make its own loops to seek and monetize breakthroughs.)
起初，团队设想这些想法将与人类共同开发，但他们的目标是实现流程的深度自动化。他们认为，如果成功的话，少数专注的个人或许就能利用 Discovery Loop 在发明创造上超越全球最大的研究机构。可以推测，这些小团队将成为 Discovery Loop 的客户。（该初创公司也可能创建自己的循环来寻求并实现突破的商业化。）
They put together a simple pitch deck and set out to talk to VCs about funding their company, which they set up as a public benefit corporation. “We just put a few slides with our backgrounds and a rough sketch of how we think our approach will be successful in a bunch of different ways,” says Dean. (They didn’t use AI to create it.) But their presence spoke louder than any PowerPoint could.
他们准备了一份简单的融资方案（pitch deck），并开始与风投机构洽谈，将公司注册为一家公益公司（Public Benefit Corporation）。“我们只是放了几张介绍我们背景的幻灯片，以及关于我们认为这种方法如何在多个方面取得成功的粗略草图，”Dean 说。（他们并没有使用 AI 来制作这份方案。）但他们的出现本身就比任何 PPT 更有说服力。
“With this team, I wouldn’t need to know what they were doing before I backed them,” says venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who met with them in his Sand Hill Road office on a Saturday, so no one would get a hint of Google’s upcoming loss. “It’s the ultimate superstar team.” Khosla also loved their idea: “Humans have been using AI to do research, not using AI to be a researcher,” he says. “The fundamental thing [in Discovery Loop] is that AI is the researcher.”
“有了这样的团队，我在投资他们之前甚至不需要知道他们在做什么，”风险投资家 Vinod Khosla 说道。他在一个周六于沙丘路（Sand Hill Road）的办公室里与他们会面，以确保没人察觉到谷歌即将面临的人才流失。“这是终极的超级明星团队。”Khosla 也非常喜欢他们的想法：“人类一直在使用 AI 来辅助研究，而不是让 AI 成为研究员，”他说，“[Discovery Loop] 的核心在于 AI 本身就是研究员。”
Other meetings took place at Dean’s house. Ultimately Khosla Ventures and an AI-oriented VC firm called Radical Ventures bought in, along with a handful of other firms. (The founders aren’t sharing how much the funding was and at what valuation–but consider that some companies are paying tens or even hundreds of millions for a single AI superstar, and these guys are GOATs.) “Building something to solve all those problems is a powerful idea,” says Radical managing partner Jordan Jacobs, who will join the startup’s board. “These people have been doing this kind of work in the past so they know what they’re doing.”
其他会议则在 Dean 的家中进行。最终，Khosla Ventures 和一家专注于 AI 的风投公司 Radical Ventures 参与了投资，还有其他几家公司也加入了进来。（创始人们没有透露具体的融资金额和估值——但考虑到有些公司为了聘请一位 AI 超级明星就愿意支付数千万甚至上亿美元，而这些人是该领域的‘史上最佳’（GOATs）。）“构建能够解决所有这些问题的系统是一个强大的想法，”Radical 的管理合伙人 Jordan Jacobs 说，他将加入该初创公司的董事会，“这些人过去一直从事此类工作，所以他们非常清楚自己在做什么。”
Negotiating the exit from Google was more painful. Dean says that Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai tried over multiple meetings to get them to keep their badges. Ultimately the team decided that they wanted the fun–and the freedom–of doing a startup.
与谷歌协商离职的过程则更为痛苦。Dean 表示，Alphabet 首席执行官 Sundar Pichai 曾多次开会试图挽留他们。最终，团队还是决定追求创业的乐趣与自由。
“In a large organization there is always a lot of inertia you have to overcome to make any radical changes,” says Vinyals. “We want to build something different.” Google ultimately gave the departing engineers its blessing, along with an investment and an arrangement to provide compute power.
“在大型组织中，要做出任何根本性的改变，总是需要克服巨大的惯性，”Vinyals 说，“我们想建立一些不同的东西。”谷歌最终对离职的工程师们表示了祝福，并提供了投资以及提供计算能力的安排。