27 years later, he just quit to start over at 58
Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist and 30th employee, is leaving the tech giant to co-found an AI start-up, taking with him three colleagues, including collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat. It’s a move that Wired likened to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards exiting the Rolling Stones.
Dean, who landed at Google in 1999 and was a pioneering force behind the design of the company’s search engine, Google Brain AI lab, and Gemini model, is launching the AI startup Discovery Loop alongside Ghemawat, Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le, and former Gemini technical lead Oriol Vinyals.
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In a statement on Discovery Loop’s website, the company notes its intention to provide AI systems that “act as a deeply positive, empowering force for humanity” while also enabling “much more rapid advances across countless fields of science.”
“We think there is opportunity for AI to more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop,” Dean told The New York Times. “You will get both a higher quantity and a higher quality of experiments, and that will lead to scientific breakthroughs and advances.”
In a message ahead of his final day at Google on Aug. 6, Dean reflected on his 27 years at the company and explained that, “as a kid, I dreamed of helping build software that would be used by many people, and Google now has thirteen products used by more than a billion people (amazing!). Our work has had a tremendous impact in the world.”
Google backs Jeff Dean’s next big AI bet
Dean and company’s departure comes as Google shuffles AI leadership, including naming DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis chair of the AI research lab as well as chief scientist at parent company Alphabet.
Meanwhile, Dean, who is a legend at both Google and within the wider tech world, told Wired that Alphabet attempted to convince he and his Discovery Loop co-founders to stay, but that the foursome “were working on different things” and “were all starting to see the possibility of AI being able to automate scientific and engineering loops.”
He also told the outlet that the idea for Discovery Loop only first arose “a few weeks ago.”
Discovery Loop didn’t immediately reply to Moneywise’s request for comment, while Google responded with a statement from Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, which celebrated Dean and Ghemawat a “helping to drive some of the most significant technology transitions, from our early search infrastructure to the neural networks that helped create the modern AI era.”
Despite leaving Google, the tech giant is investing in Discovery Loop and offering the startup some of its services, including cloud infrastructure, which Pichai reiterated in a social media post on Wednesday.
The Times also noted that Discover Loop intends to “operate as a public benefit corporation,” or B-corp, with Dean telling them that, “There is a lot of good that can be done in the world if we can distribute scientific discoveries broadly. We might make decisions that are not necessarily in the company’s purist financial interests.”
Meanwhile, at Google, it’s clear that Dean and his departing colleagues will be sorely missed. On a company message board chat, one employee reportedly quipped that “Google is not losing Jeff Dean. Google is finally open-sourcing him for humanity,” Business Insider reports.
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/scientist-jeff-dean-joined-google-173000017.html
