Vietnamese AI Luminary Departs Google to Found Startup
Dr. Quoc Le, alongside three renowned scientists, has exited Google to establish Discovery Loop, a startup dedicated to leveraging AI to optimize scientific research.
"I’m incredibly excited to co-found Discovery Loop with long-time collaborators Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Oriol Vinyals. Our mission is to automate machine learning, engineering, and science," Quoc Le shared on his personal page on August 5, following the public announcement of the project.
The startup aims to develop AI solutions capable of autonomously solving critical challenges across various scientific fields by accelerating the pace of engineering research.
Redefining the 'Experimental Loop'
On its website, the startup identifies a fundamental research bottleneck: the "experimental loop." This iterative process consists of proposing an experiment, executing it, verifying the results, and then refining the methodology.
The team assesses that current manual experimental loops are difficult to scale, noting that in many fields, this process is "extremely slow and labor-intensive."
The startup intends to address these hurdles through automation, utilizing advanced AI models and large-scale computational infrastructure to accelerate the process by "running thousands of experiments in parallel." The team also asserts that this method can significantly shorten iteration cycles, thereby increasing both the quantity and quality of scientific and engineering output.
A High-Profile Founding Team
According to TechCrunch, the company has received financial backing from multiple sources, including Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Several sources indicate that Jeff Dean will serve as CEO. The founding members are all distinguished researchers, including three of the most-cited individuals in the field of artificial intelligence and two of the most-cited in the field of distributed systems.
About the Founders
Dr. Quoc Le, born in 1982 in Thua Thien Hue, was one of Google’s leading AI researchers. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and was honored by MIT Technology Review as one of the world’s top innovators under 35 for his contributions to global AI. He has returned to Vietnam multiple times to share insights on AI research and development.
Jeff Dean, who has worked at Google since 1999 as the company's 30th employee, is credited with making significant contributions to the core infrastructure of Google’s search engine. He also left a significant mark on the development of Gemini multimodal models and led the company’s early AI research.
"After an incredible 27-year journey at Google, Jeff is in a phase of wanting to try something new, and we are very excited to support him," CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on a blog on August 6.
Over the past few months, Google has seen the departure of several top scientists. In June, two prominent Google researchers, Noam Shazeer and John Jumper, resigned within the same week to join competing firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Source: VnExpress
