Discovery Loop(discoveryloop.com)
784 points by xtreak29 20 hours ago | 489 comments
tl;dr: Discovery Loop is a new startup founded by Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals aiming to automate scientific and engineering experimental loops using frontier AI models and large-scale compute. The company will initially focus on automating ML research itself, then apply the resulting capabilities to broader domains like drug discovery, solar energy, and clean water — targeting NAE Grand Challenges.
HN Discussion:
  • Automating experiments hits physical reality barriers that AI intelligence alone cannot overcome
  • ~This is essentially a retirement/retention vehicle for Google's senior engineers, not a serious startup
  • Computer-driven discovery could unlock a new scientific revolution by exhaustively searching overlooked ideas
  • The mission statement is overly convoluted jargon typical of vague tech grandiosity
  • This is an institutional scaling of existing autoresearch concepts like Karpathy's work