Jeff Dean co-founded the AI research startup Discovery Loop in August 2026 and runs it as chief executive. He spent almost 27 years at Google, where he co-designed MapReduce, Bigtable and TensorFlow, led Google AI and was chief scientist.
Jeff Dean co-founded the AI research startup Discovery Loop in August 2026 and runs it as chief executive. He spent almost 27 years at Google, where he co-designed MapReduce, Bigtable and TensorFlow, led Google AI and was chief scientist.
Dean took a degree in computer science and economics at the University of Minnesota in 1990, with an undergraduate thesis on neural networks, and a PhD in computer science at the University of Washington in 1996, on compilers and optimization for object-oriented languages. Before graduate school he wrote statistical modeling and forecasting software for the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS; after it he worked at DEC/Compaq's Western Research Laboratory, much of the time with Sanjay Ghemawat.
He joined Google in mid-1999 and designed large parts of its advertising, crawling, indexing and query-serving systems. With Ghemawat he built MapReduce and Bigtable, and he worked on Spanner, Protocol Buffers, LevelDB and Google Translate. As of 2018 the two were the only Google employees holding the title of Senior Fellow, the company's highest technical level.
In 2011 he joined Google X to study deep neural networks. The work, known for "the cat neuron paper", became Google Brain, which he led from 2012, and he was the primary designer of the first version of TensorFlow. He took charge of Google's AI division in April 2018 and became chief scientist in 2023, when Google Brain and DeepMind merged into Google DeepMind, and co-led the Gemini models.
Google announced on 5 August 2026 that Dean would leave. With Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le he founded Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that plans to use AI for research in fields such as chip design, biology, drug discovery and materials; Google is a founding investor. On stage at Stanford in October 2026 he said Google had made coding one of its priorities but not the priority, the bet Anthropic made.
SourcesWritten 9 November 2026