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Jeff Dean

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For the punk rock musician, see Jeff Dean (musician).

Jeff Dean
Dean in 2025
Born (1968-07-23) July 23, 1968 (age 57)
Hawaii
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of Minnesota, B.S. Computer Science and Engineering (1990)
University of Washington, Ph.D. Computer Science (1996)
Known forMapReduce, Bigtable, Spanner, TensorFlow
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsGoogle, Digital Equipment Corporation
ThesisWhole-program optimization of object-oriented languages (1996)
Doctoral advisorCraig Chambers

Jeffrey Adgate Dean (born July 23, 1968) is an American computer scientist and software engineer. Since 2018, he has been the lead of Google AI.[1] He was appointed Google's chief scientist in 2023 after the merger of DeepMind and Google Brain into Google DeepMind.[2]

Education

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Dean received a B.S., summa cum laude, from the University of Minnesota in computer science and economics in 1990.[3] His undergraduate thesis was on neural networks in C programming, advised by Vipin Kumar.[4][5]

He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington in 1996, working under Craig Chambers on compilers[6] and whole-program optimization techniques for object-oriented programming languages.[7] He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009, which recognized his work on "the science and engineering of large-scale distributed computer systems".[8]

Career

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Before Google

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Before graduate school, Dean worked at the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS, developing software for statistical modeling and forecasting of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.[9]

After graduate school, Dean worked at DEC/Compaq's Western Research Laboratory,[10] on profiling tools, microprocessor architecture and information retrieval.[9] Much of his work was completed in close collaboration with Sanjay Ghemawat.[11][6]

Career at Google

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Dean joined Google in mid-1999. He joined Google X in 2011 to investigate deep neural networks, which had just resurged in popularity. This ended with "the cat neuron paper", a deep belief network trained by unsupervised learning on YouTube videos.[12] This project morphed into Google Brain, also formed in 2011. Jeff Dean became its leader in 2012. In April 2018, he was appointed the head of Google's artificial intelligence division, after John Giannandrea left to lead Apple's AI projects.[13]

While at Google, he designed and implemented large portions of the company's advertising, crawling, indexing and query serving systems, along with various pieces of the distributed computing infrastructure that underlies most of Google's products.[6] At various times, he has also worked on improving search quality, statistical machine translation and internal software development tools and has had significant involvement in the engineering hiring process.

The projects Dean has worked on include:

  • Original design of Protocol Buffers, an open-source data interchange format.
  • Spanner, a scalable, multi-version, globally distributed, and synchronously replicated database
  • Some of the production system design and statistical machine translation system for Google Translate
  • Bigtable, a large-scale semi-structured storage system[6]
  • MapReduce, a system for large-scale data processing applications[6]
  • LevelDB, an open-source on-disk key-value store
  • DistBelief, a proprietary machine-learning system for distributed training of deep neural networks. The "Belief" part is because it could be used to train deep belief networks. It was eventually refactored into TensorFlow. It was used to train the network in "the cat neuron paper".[12][14]
  • TensorFlow, an open-source machine-learning software library. He was among the designers and implementers of the initial release.[15][6]
  • Pathways, an asynchronous distributed dataflow system for neural networks. It was used in PaLM.[15]

He was an early member of Google Brain,[6] a team that studies large-scale artificial neural networks, and he has headed artificial intelligence efforts since they were split from Google Search.[16]

In 2023, DeepMind was merged with Google Brain to form a unified AI research unit, Google DeepMind. As part of this reorganization, Dean became Google's chief scientist.[2][15]

In 2025, Dean joined the board of Laude Institute, steering the organization with David Patterson, Joelle Pineau, and Andy Konwinski.[17]

Controversies

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In December 2020, Google’s Ethical AI co-lead Timnit Gebru and the company disagreed over a draft paper she co-authored on the risks and ethical implications of large language models. Google’s head of AI, Jeff Dean, informed her by email that the paper “didn’t meet our bar for publication,” citing concerns about its framing and omissions of key computer-science citations. Gebru responded that she could not move forward under those conditions without full transparency into the review process, and indicated she would step away if her demands were not met, though she did not explicitly offer her resignation. Google declined to reopen the review or share reviewer identities, and Gebru’s employment subsequently ended under terms both parties described as a resignation. In the aftermath, Dean canceled a scheduled AI ethics team all-hands meeting and acknowledged that the episode had “surfaced large, important issues” around research culture, bias, and inclusion within Google’s AI organization. Critics argued that Dean’s strict enforcement of publication standards and the handling of Gebru’s concerns reflected broader tensions over academic freedom, diversity, and the treatment of underrepresented researchers at the company.[18][19][20][21]

Philanthropy

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Dean and his wife, Heidi Hopper, started the Hopper-Dean Foundation and began making philanthropic grants in 2011. In 2016, the foundation gave $2 million each to UC Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Washington, Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University to support programs that promote diversity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).[22] The Menlo Park-based foundation gave $22.1 million to a variety of universities and non-profits in 2023 and ended the year with $54.4 million in assets, according to its Form 990.[23]

Personal life

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Dean is married and has two daughters.[6]

He is the subject of an Internet meme for "Jeff Dean facts". Similar to Chuck Norris facts, the Jeff Dean facts exaggerate his programming powers.[24] For example:[25]

Once, in early 2002, when the index servers went down, Jeff Dean answered user queries manually for two hours. Evals showed a quality improvement of 5 points.

Awards and honors

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Publications

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Selected papers

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Interviews

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Dean was interviewed for the 2018 book Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it by the American futurist Martin Ford.[29]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Vincent, James (April 3, 2018). "Google veteran Jeff Dean takes over as company's AI chief". The Verge. Retrieved November 29, 2023.
  2. ^ a b Elias, Jennifer (April 20, 2023). "Read the internal memo Alphabet sent in merging A.I.-focused groups DeepMind and Google Brain". CNBC. Retrieved June 22, 2023.
  3. ^ "Jeff Dean".
  4. ^ Dean, Jeffrey (1990). Parallel implementations of neural network training: Two back-propagation approaches (Thesis). University of Minnesota.
  5. ^ @jeffdean (August 27, 2018). "[...] Kudos to University of Minnesota (@UMNews) Honors Program. Earlier this year, I asked Prof. Vipin Kumar, my advisor for this work, if he still had a copy, since I had lost my copy. He didn't, but checked with the Honors Program [...]" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h Somers, James (December 3, 2018). "The Friendship That Made Google Huge". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved September 28, 2025.
  7. ^ "STANFORD TALKS; Jeff Dean: TensorFlow Overview and Future Directions". Stanford University. January 21, 2016. Archived from the original on August 28, 2016. Retrieved August 15, 2016.
  8. ^ "Jeff Dean elected to National Academy of Engineering". UW CSE News. University of Washington. February 5, 2009. Retrieved August 15, 2016.
    - "Jeffrey A Dean - Award Winner". Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved August 15, 2018.
  9. ^ a b "Jeff Dean". Speakerpedia. Retrieved August 19, 2016.
  10. ^ Metz, Cade (August 8, 2008). "If Xerox PARC Invented the PC, Google Invented the Internet". Wired. Retrieved August 19, 2016.
  11. ^ Metz, Cade (August 8, 2012). "If Xerox PARC Invented the PC, Google Invented the Internet". Wired. Retrieved December 16, 2017.
  12. ^ a b Le, Quoc V. (May 2013). "Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning". 2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. IEEE. pp. 8595–8598. arXiv:1112.6209. doi:10.1109/icassp.2013.6639343. ISBN 978-1-4799-0356-6.
  13. ^ Simonite, Tom. "Google's New AI Head Is So Smart He Doesn't Need AI". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved November 29, 2024.
  14. ^ Markoff, John (June 25, 2012). "How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000". The New York Times.
  15. ^ a b c "Jeffrey Dean". Google Research. Retrieved October 25, 2024.
  16. ^ D'Onfro, Jillian (April 2, 2018). "Google is splitting A.I. into its own business unit and shaking up its search leadership". CNBC. Retrieved April 3, 2018.
  17. ^ Sullivan, Mark (June 23, 2025). "This Perplexity cofounder wants to help AI breakthroughs graduate from university labs". Fast Company. Retrieved September 30, 2025.
  18. ^ Hao, Karen (December 4, 2020). "Google pushed out an AI ethics researcher days after she published a paper on risks of language models". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved October 1, 2025.
  19. ^ Garrahan, Matthew (December 4, 2020). "Google's AI ethics investigator Timnit Gebru was forced out after a paper on big tech risks". Vox. Retrieved October 1, 2025.
  20. ^ Banjo, Shelly; Bergen, Mark (December 10, 2020). "The withering email that got an ethical AI researcher fired at Google". Platformer. Retrieved October 1, 2025.
  21. ^ Langley, Hannah (December 15, 2020). "Google's AI chief canceled a year-end gathering in light of the backlash over researcher Timnit Gebru's exit: 'A celebration doesn't seem appropriate at this time'". Business Insider. Retrieved October 1, 2025.
  22. ^ "$1M Hopper-Dean Foundation Gift for Diversity in CS". UC Berkeley. Retrieved January 29, 2019.
    - Williams, Tate (August 10, 2016). "One of Google's Top Programmers Has Made STEM Diversity a Philanthropic Cause". Inside Philanthropy. Retrieved August 15, 2016.
    - "$1 million gift to support diversity in STEM education". Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved October 25, 2020.
  23. ^ "HOPPER-DEAN FOUNDATION C/O CATALYST FAMILY OFFICE LLC — 2023 990PF". irs-efile-renderer.instrumentl.com. Retrieved September 17, 2025.
  24. ^ Carlson, Nicholas. "Astounding 'Facts' About Google's Most Badass Engineer, Jeff Dean". Business Insider. Retrieved November 30, 2024.
  25. ^ Ritzdorf, Lucas (October 23, 2024), LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts, retrieved November 29, 2024
  26. ^ "Jeffrey A Dean". ACM Awards Home.
  27. ^ "The Mark Weiser Award". ACM SIGOPS. Retrieved July 5, 2019.
  28. ^ Newly Elected Members, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, April 2016, retrieved April 20, 2016
  29. ^ Ford, Marin (2018). Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it. Packt Publishing Ltd. ISBN 9781789131260.
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