Descriptions:
Bloomberg Tech sits down with Khosla Ventures managing director Samir Kaul to discuss Discovery Loop, a newly announced AI startup co-founded by Jeff Dean — Google’s longtime chief scientist — along with other senior Google veterans representing a collective eight decades at the company. Khosla Ventures co-led the seed round, though neither the size nor the valuation has been disclosed. The startup’s focus is recursive self-improvement (RSI) applied to scientific experimentation: AI systems that design experiments, evaluate results, and autonomously generate thousands of parallel follow-on experiments in a closed loop, targeting domains including fusion energy, solid-state battery materials, and drug discovery.
Kaul draws a direct parallel to Khosla’s early bets on OpenAI (when it was still a nonprofit) and General Intuition, framing RSI as the third foundational primitive after large language models and world models. He argues that a focused private company can move faster and take more concentrated risk than hyperscalers like Google DeepMind or Anthropic, whose research agendas span many priorities. Discovery Loop is structured as a public benefit corporation — a structure Kaul says may attract mission-aligned engineering talent without limiting venture-scale returns, citing OpenAI’s nonprofit origins as precedent.
The conversation also touches on the broader competitive landscape: Kaul speculates that OpenAI and Anthropic together may already represent $100 billion in revenue and nearly $2 trillion in combined market cap, framing that scale as a benchmark for what RSI-focused companies could eventually achieve.
📺 Source: Bloomberg Tech · Published August 21, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
