Former Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean raises new funding, AI startup's valuation target soars to $50 billion

Beating AI News Flash: AI startup Discovery Loop, founded by former Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, is seeking a new round of funding at a target valuation of approximately $50 billion. According to people familiar with the matter, just weeks ago the company was raising $1 billion at a valuation of about $10 billion, and its valuation target has now been significantly raised.

Discovery Loop was co-founded by Dean along with former core Google researchers Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, with the goal of using AI to run thousands of experiments in parallel to accelerate research in science and engineering. Dean left Google last month after 27 years at the company.

The company's first funding round, announced last month, was led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital, while Alphabet participated as a founding investor and cloud partner.

This funding plan once again highlights how top AI talent is being pursued by capital. Even before their products are mature or even launched, AI labs such as Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machines Lab have already secured massive funding and reached valuations in the tens of billions of dollars.