Khosla backs Discovery Loop's bet on AI as the researcher
TL;DR
- Khosla Ventures co-led a seed round for Discovery Loop, a week-old AI startup with no product, no customers, and no revenue.
- Discovery Loop is reportedly in talks to raise about $1 billion at a valuation near $10 billion, with Alphabet as founding investor and cloud partner.
- Founders Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le are pitching AI systems that act as the researcher rather than a tool.
Khosla Ventures co-led a seed round for Discovery Loop, a week-old AI startup with no product, no customers, and no revenue that is reportedly in talks to raise about $1 billion at a valuation near $10 billion.
Vinod Khosla went on CNBC's Squawk Box on August 10 to talk through the deal, the state of the AI race, and AI economics. Discovery Loop was announced August 5 by Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, four longtime Google and Google DeepMind researchers, as a public benefit corporation whose stated mission is 'to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress.'
Khosla, who met the founders at his Sand Hill Road office on a Saturday to preserve secrecy, told Wired: 'With this team, I wouldn't need to know what they were doing before I backed them. It's the ultimate superstar team.' He framed the bet plainly. 'Humans have been using AI to do research, not using AI to be a researcher. The fundamental thing … is that AI is the researcher.'
Alphabet is the founding investor and cloud services partner. Radical Ventures co-led with Khosla; Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital also participated.
Originally reported by cnbc.com
Read the original article →Original headline: Vinod Khosla on funding Discovery Loop, state of AI race and AI economics