Jeff Dean, one of the most senior and impactful executives at Google, is resigning from the tech giant to establish his own AI startup.

Joining him as co-founders are several prominent researchers from the company, including Sanjay Ghemawat, a leading engineer and senior fellow at Google; Quoc Le, a vital AI researcher and one of the founders of Google Brain; and Oriol Vinyals, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. Dean reportedly intends to take on the role of CEO.

The team is launching Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation aiming to harness AI to accelerate scientific research.

Discovery Loop states it will utilize high-performance algorithms to initiate and complete thousands of experiments concurrently, aiming to partially automate the research process and increase the scale of experimentation.

The startup is also keen on employing AI to assist in the creation of more robust AI (a process termed recursive self-improvement), which would entirely eliminate human iteration from the process.

“While science and engineering have greatly advanced society in recent centuries, progress has typically depended on slow, sequential iterations by humans, creating a substantial bottleneck,” the company mentioned in a press release. “Discovery Loop is building sophisticated AI systems that utilize immense computational power to radically change the speed and efficiency of innovation by automating entire experimental cycles.”

Utilizing AI to speed up scientific discovery has been a major focus of both the science and technology sectors for many years, but until lately, it was largely a field of experimentation with limited commercial potential.

The company has garnered financial backing from various sources, including Google’s parent company Alphabet. The initial funding round is being co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, the company announced on Wednesday. Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital also took part.

“The next significant frontier for AI is to go beyond merely answering questions to actually making discoveries,” the founding team stated in a joint declaration. “By significantly expediting the processes of engineering and scientific discovery, we can bring the advantages of transformative technologies to the world far sooner.”

Dean has been with Google since 1999 and was the company’s 30th employee. Over the years, he has played a key role in Google search’s fundamental infrastructure, including its crawling and indexing systems and its query-serving system. He has also significantly influenced Google Gemini’s multimodal models and was instrumental in the company’s early AI research.

“We believe there is potential for AI to more completely automate what has traditionally been a labor-intensive human experimental loop,” Dean informed the New York Times. “You’ll achieve both a greater quantity and higher quality of experiments, leading to scientific breakthroughs and progress.”