Jeff Dean, Google's 30th employee, departs after 27 years
What's the story
Jeff Dean, Google's 30th employee and chief scientist, has announced his departure from the tech giant after a long 27-year tenure. He will now co-found an artificial intelligence (AI) start-up called Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le. The news was confirmed by Dean himself in a farewell email shared with his colleagues at Google.
Legacy
Dean's journey at Google
Dean joined Google in 1999 when the company had just 25 employees.
In his farewell note, he expressed gratitude for having contributed to some of the most widely used and impactful products at Google.
He recalled how he always wanted to build software that would be used by many people, a dream he saw come true with Google's work across multiple products.
AI impact
Shaping Google's AI and ML capabilities
Dean played a pivotal role in shaping Google's AI and machine learning capabilities. He built Google Brain, a research lab that helped push the industry toward AI.
His work on unsupervised learning, model distillation, mixture-of-experts model architectures, word2vec, neural architecture search, and reinforcement learning (RL) has been instrumental in advancing these technologies at Google.
Farewell message
Projects Dean will cherish from his time at Google
In his farewell email, Dean listed some of the projects and memories he will cherish from his time at Google.
These include working on multiple generations of Google Search, creating the first Google Ads system, launching Google News and Translate, and starting the TPU program.
He also fondly remembered biking to offsites in Monterey, changing offices 18 times during his tenure.
Transition
Transition for Google and Pichai's message to Dean
Dean's resignation marks a major transition for Google, which now has over 190,000 employees.
CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted Dean's instrumental role in driving some of Google's most important technology transitions over the years.
"On a personal note, it's been a privilege to work alongside Jeff and Sanjay," Pichai wrote in his farewell message to Dean.
He also noted that Google will continue to work with Discovery Loop as a founding investor and Cloud partner.