Jeff Dean, one of Google’s most seasoned and influential executives, is leaving the tech giant to found his own AI startup. Joining him as co-founders are several distinguished researchers from the company, including Sanjay Ghemawat, a senior fellow and top engineer 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 is expected to take on the role of CEO.

Together, the team is launching Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation focused on leveraging AI to accelerate scientific research. The company aims to use advanced algorithms to initiate and iterate thousands of experiments at once, with the goal of partially automating the research process and vastly increasing the scale of experimentation. Discovery Loop also plans to explore using AI to build more powerful AI systems—a concept known as recursive self-improvement—which could eventually remove human involvement from 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 stated 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.”

The idea of using AI to speed up scientific discovery has long intrigued the tech and science communities, but until recently, it remained largely experimental with limited commercial use. Discovery Loop has secured backing from various sources, including Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The initial funding round is co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital, as announced Wednesday.

“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.”

Dean has been with Google since 1999, joining as the company’s 30th employee. Over the years, he’s played a key role in building Google Search’s core infrastructure, including its crawling, indexing, and query-serving systems. He also had a major impact on Google Gemini’s multimodal models and was a leading figure in the company’s early AI research.

“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.”