@samuel_ys92: Hao Zhang leaves Meta to join Discovery Loop. How long did he stay at Meta's Superintelligence Lab? One summer. This ye…
Summary
Hao Zhang leaves Meta's Superintelligence Lab to join Discovery Loop, a new AI company founded by Jeff Dean aimed at automating machine learning research with a high valuation.
View Cached Full Text
Cached at: 09/27/26, 11:21 AM
Hao Zhang leaves Meta to join Discovery Loop.
How long did he stay at Meta’s Superintelligence Lab? One summer.
This year, he took academic leave from UCSD to join Meta’s TBD Lab, working on inference for Muse images and videos. In his departure post, he wrote: “There’s a version of me that could have stayed here for a long, long time. A new mission is calling.”
The new mission is Discovery Loop—a company Jeff Dean founded just this August. The four founders: Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, Oriol Vinyals. Jeff Dean left Google for this, after nearly 27 years there.
Radical and Khosla co-led the investment. According to BI, the valuation now being discussed is $50 billion: the company has been around for just over a month. What they aim to do: enable AI to propose experiments itself, run them itself, learn from them itself, iterate on them itself, with thousands of experiments running in parallel. The first step is to transform machine learning research
And the things Hao Zhang has built in recent years have each become others’ default choice: vLLM is now the standard engine for running large model inference, Chatbot Arena is the world’s go-to place for ranking models, Vicuna is the starting point for open-source conversational models.
He himself charts this trajectory as: Vicuna → Chatbot Arena → vLLM → DistServe → LMGame → FastVideo This year he also won a Sloan Fellowship, NSF CAREER award, and the EuroSys Test of Time award.
To get AI to do ML research in place of humans, someone first has to lay the foundations for ML research.
For more information, please see:
Hao Zhang (@haozhangml): Career update: this Wednesday was my last day at @Meta Superintelligence Lab.
Earlier this year, I took academic leave from @UCSanDiego and joined Meta TBD Lab. It ended up being one of the best summers I’ve had in years – honestly, I couldn’t have asked for a better place to
Similar Articles
Jeff Dean Leaving Google
Jeff Dean and longtime collaborators announce the founding of Discovery Loop, a Public Benefit Corporation aimed at automating scientific and engineering discovery with AI, after leaving Google.
Google’s Top AI Brains Are Leaving to Launch Discovery Loop
Top Google AI researchers Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le are leaving Google to found Discovery Loop, a startup focused on automating scientific and engineering loops to advance AI and other fields.
Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup
Jeff Dean and several other top Google AI researchers are leaving to launch Discovery Loop, a public benefit startup aimed at using AI to automate and massively scale scientific experimentation, with backing from Alphabet and major VC firms.
@rohanpaul_ai: Google's chief scientist is leaving after 27 years to build AI that can run its own research cycle with little human he…
Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist, is leaving after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop, an AI research company aiming to automate the research cycle. The startup has seed funding from Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Alphabet as a founding investor and cloud partner.
Why I'm skeptical about Discovery Loop (leading minds from Google who left recently), even though they'll raise money completely deservedly.
An opinion piece expressing skepticism about Discovery Loop, an AI research startup founded by former Google AI leaders, arguing that automating ML research differs fundamentally from automating scientific/engineering tasks and questioning their unique advantage while acknowledging they deservedly raised funding.