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News of the day
1. Google AI pioneers Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, along with two other top scientists, depart to found Discovery Loop, a startup focused on automating the scientific method. → Read more
2. Google partners with Broadcom and others on a financing deal for Anthropic's AI chips, moving risk off its books. → Read more
3. Shopify reports AI search triples traffic and sales, complementing traditional search and boosting smaller merchants. → Read more
4. Black Forest Labs launches FLUX 3 Video, generating Full HD clips with audio and multilingual lip-sync, claiming superiority over competitors. → Read more
Our take
Hi Dotikers!
Jeff Dean is leaving Google after 27 years. And he isn't going alone: Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le are going with him. That list of names covers MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, TensorFlow, the TPUs, seq2seq and a solid chunk of Gemini.
Their new venture is called Discovery Loop, set up as a public benefit corporation, with an ambition that is easy to state and brutal to deliver: automate the experimental loop. Propose a hypothesis, implement it, run it, evaluate, start again, thousands of times in parallel. First target, machine learning research itself. Then chip design, biology, materials.
Google is a founding investor, cloud partner, and is supplying the compute for the first year. Khosla and Radical round out the round. A resignation package where your former employer pays the electricity bill is a rather well negotiated exit.
The detail worth pausing on is a line from Vinyals: current models are not good at coming up with genuinely new ideas. That is exactly the step that makes the difference. Launching runs and measuring results is something any serious lab already does reasonably well. So the bet rests on the weakest link, not the strongest one. That said, ML is the one field where the loop is fully scorable, where the experiment is code and where physics slows nothing down. Starting there is the only defensible choice. The nods to biology and materials belong to the pitch deck for now.
Then there is the timing. Two days ago, Alex Karp was accusing the labs of trying to capture their partners' means of production. Today, four researchers are raising money to automate the ultimate means of production, the researcher. Karp was aiming at tokens, the real shift in value may be happening somewhere else.
What to watch is neither the funding nor the résumés, but the first result the field agrees to call a discovery rather than an optimisation.
Alex.
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