Four Top Google A.I. Researchers Form New Start-Up

Jeff Dean, who for years was one of Google’s most important executives, is leading the new artificial intelligence company with the backing of Google.

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Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, and three other artificial intelligence researchers are leaving the company to form their own start-up, a move that exposes the changing power structure inside Google and shows there is still plenty of venture money willing to back new A.I. ideas.

Dr. Dean, Google’s 30th employee, is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of the company. He played a key role in creating the global computer network powering its search business and was one of the company’s early leaders in A.I. research.

His profile inside Google appeared to wane in recent years as other executives, including the co-founder Sergey Brin, asserted control over Google’s all-in bet on A.I. But Dr. Dean remained one of the key engineers driving the creation of the company’s most important technologies.

His new company, called Discovery Loop, joins a growing list of prominent start-ups chasing a goal that has obsessed Silicon Valley researchers for decades. Dr. Dean and his collaborators want to build A.I. that can improve itself with little or no help from humans.

They believe that this mind-bending process, called recursive self-improvement , can significantly accelerate the development of A.I. The same techniques, they say, can then help design new kinds of computer hardware, discover new drugs, create new materials and speed other forms of scientific discovery.

“We think there is opportunity for A.I. to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop,” Dr. Dean said in an interview at his home in Silicon Valley. “You will get both a higher quantity and a higher quality of experiments, and that will lead to scientific breakthroughs and advances.”

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