Jeff Dean

Jeff Dean earned a PhD in computer science at the University of Washington in 1996 and joined Google in 1999, when it had about 20 employees. Over the next decade he co-designed several generations of its crawling, indexing and search-serving systems and, usually with his longtime partner Sanjay Ghemawat, the distributed infrastructure the company ran on: MapReduce (published in 2004), Bigtable, Spanner, protocol buffers and LevelDB.

In 2011 he helped start Google Brain as a project at Google X. In June 2012 he and Andrew Ng reported that a neural network spread across 16,000 processor cores had learned, from unlabeled YouTube frames, to recognize cats without being told what a cat was. Google open-sourced TensorFlow, the team's machine learning system, in November 2015, and Dean was a co-author with Geoffrey Hinton and Oriol Vinyals of the 2015 paper on knowledge distillation. He later ran Google AI and Google Research.

In December 2020 his organization was at the center of Timnit Gebru's departure. In an internal email Dean wrote that her co-authored paper on large language models "didn't meet our bar for publication" because it "ignored too much relevant research," and that she had offered to resign if conditions were not met. Gebru said she had been forced out.

When Google merged Brain with DeepMind in April 2023, Sundar Pichai made Dean Google's Chief Scientist, reporting to him and serving both Google Research and Google DeepMind, and Dean and Oriol Vinyals were named the overall technical leads of Gemini in its December 2023 technical report. On 5 August 2026, after 27 years, he left to co-found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation in Palo Alto, with Ghemawat, Vinyals and Quoc Le. It aims to automate the experimental loop of machine learning research, then science and engineering; Google is a founding investor and cloud partner, and Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures co-led its seed round.