Jeff Dean | |
|---|---|
 Dean in 2025 | |
| Born | (1968-07-23)July 23, 1968 (age 57) |
| Alma mater | University of Minnesota, B.S. Computer Science and Engineering (1990) University of Washington, Ph.D. Computer Science (1996) |
| Known for | MapReduce,Bigtable,Spanner,TensorFlow |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | Google,Digital Equipment Corporation |
| Thesis | Whole-program optimization of object-oriented languages (1996) |
| Doctoral advisor | Craig Chambers |
Jeffrey AdgateDean (born July 23, 1968) is an Americancomputer scientist andsoftware engineer. Since 2018, he has been the lead ofGoogle AI.[1] He was appointedGoogle's chief scientist in 2023 after the merger of DeepMind andGoogle Brain intoGoogle DeepMind.[2]
Dean received a B.S.,summa cum laude, from theUniversity of Minnesota incomputer science and economics in 1990.[3] His undergraduate thesis was onneural networks in C programming, advised by Vipin Kumar.[4][5]
He received a Ph.D. in computer science from theUniversity of Washington in 1996, working underCraig Chambers oncompilers[6] and whole-program optimization techniques forobject-oriented programming languages.[7] He was elected to theNational Academy of Engineering in 2009, which recognized his work on "the science and engineering of large-scaledistributed computer systems".[8]
Before graduate school, Dean worked at theWorld Health Organization's Global Programme onAIDS, developing software forstatistical modeling and forecasting of theHIV/AIDSpandemic.[9]
After graduate school, Dean worked atDEC/Compaq's Western Research Laboratory,[10] on profiling tools, microprocessor architecture and information retrieval.[9] Much of his work was completed in close collaboration withSanjay Ghemawat.[11][6]
Dean joined Google in mid-1999.[3] He was Google's 30th employee.[12] As of 2018, Dean andSanjay Ghemawat are the only two employees at Google to hold the title of Senior Fellow, the highest technical level at the company.[6]
Dean designed and implemented large portions of Google'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.
Company systems Dean has worked on include:
Dean joinedGoogle X in 2011 to investigatedeep neural networks, which had just resurged in popularity. This ended with "the cat neuron paper", adeep belief network trained byunsupervised learning on YouTube videos.[13] This project morphed intoGoogle Brain, a team that studies large-scale artificial neural networks, also formed in 2011.[6] Jeff Dean became its leader in 2012.
Dean is credited with the following AI systems:
In April 2018, Dean was appointed the head of Google'sartificial intelligence division, afterJohn Giannandrea left to lead Apple's AI projects.[16][17]
In December 2020, Google’s Ethical AI team co-leadTimnit Gebru and the company disagreed over a draft paper she co-authored on the risks andethical implications oflarge language models. 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.[18][19][20][21] In an open letter, critics demanded that members of Google's senior leadership, including Dean, "explain the process by which the paper was unilaterally rejected by leadership."[22] Google's CEO subsequently issued an apology.[23]
In 2023, DeepMind was merged withGoogle Brain to form a unified AI research unit,Google DeepMind, headed byDemis Hassabis. As part of this reorganization, Dean became Google's chief scientist.[2][15] Dean proposed the nameGemini for the chatbot developed by Google DeepMind, "because it's like twins coming together".[12]
In 2025, Dean joined the board of Laude Institute, steering the organization withDavid Patterson,Joelle Pineau, andAndy Konwinski.[24]
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 toUC Berkeley,Massachusetts Institute of Technology,University of Washington,Stanford University andCarnegie Mellon University to support programs that promote diversity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).[25] 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.[26]
Dean is married and has two daughters.[6]
He is the subject of anInternet meme for "Jeff Dean facts". Similar toChuck Norris facts, the Jeff Dean facts exaggerate his programming powers.[27] For example:[28]
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.
Dean was interviewed for the 2018 bookArchitects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it by the American futuristMartin Ford.[32]
