On July 25, Jeff Dean spoke to 6,000 would-be founders at Y Combinator’s Startup School at San Francisco’s Chase Center. He is cofounder of Google Brain, chief scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research, and technical colead on the company’s flagship AI model Gemini. Unbeknownst to the crowd, Dean was talking about his own secret startup, which he had just organized. The autonomous experiment loops they create initially will be directed towards improving the company’s advanced machine learning algorithms. That improved software will then become the core of an AI system that can tackle problems in subsequent domains.