Jeff DeanJeff Dean

Earned a BS from the University of Minnesota and a PhD from the University of Washington under Craig Chambers. Joined Google in 1999 as one of the earliest engineers. Built core systems that let Google scale: MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, and later TensorFlow. Co-founded Google Brain in 2011 with Andrew Ng, Greg Corrado, and Rajat Monga -- the famous project that used 16,000 CPUs to train a network that learned to recognize cats from YouTube videos. Became SVP of Google AI and now serves as Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind, overseeing Gemini development. Known as one of the greatest systems engineers in computing history. In August 2026 he left Google after 27 years to become CEO of Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that aims to automate the scientific experimental loop with AI, co-founded with Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals and backed by Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Alphabet.