Jeff Dean

American computer scientist who shaped both Google's computing infrastructure and its AI research. Joining Google in 1999, he co-designed with Sanjay Ghemawat much of its large-scale infrastructure, including MapReduce (2004), Bigtable and Spanner. In 2011 he co-founded Google BrainGoogle Brain, prop. n.: Google's deep-learning research team from 2011 to 2023, where the transformer — the design behind today's chatbots — and the TensorFlow software were created. with Andrew NgAndrew Ng, prop. n.: A British-born American computer scientist whose online courses have taught machine learning to millions; he also co-founded Google's deep learning team, Google Brain, and the online-course company Coursera. and Greg Corrado; its DistBelief system trained neural networks across thousands of machines (2012), and its successor TensorFlowTensorFlow, prop. n.: Google's free software toolkit for building, training and running machine-learning models; it led the field after 2015 and still runs many models inside phones, browsers and company systems. (2015) became a leading deep learningdeep learning, n.: Machine learning done with neural networks built from many stacked layers: raw data such as pixels, sound or text goes in at one end, and each layer turns what it receives into something more abstract. framework. He backed the development of Google's tensor processing unitsTPU, abbr.: Google's own family of chips built specifically for AI, used to train and run its Gemini models and rented to other companies through its cloud., led Google's AI research divisions from 2018, and when Brain merged with DeepMind in 2023 became Google's chief scientist and a technical co-lead of GeminiGemini, prop. n.: Google's family of AI models and its chatbot assistant, launched in December 2023. Gemini models handle text, images, audio and video and power many Google products.. He co-authored word2vecword2vec, prop. n.: A 2013 Google technique that learns a list of numbers for each word by training a very small network to predict which words appear near it across billions of words of text. and, with Geoffrey HintonGeoffrey Hinton, prop. n.: A British-Canadian scientist whose decades of persistent work on brain-inspired neural networks laid the foundations of modern AI; often called a 'godfather of AI', he now warns publicly about its dangers. and Oriol VinyalsOriol Vinyals, prop. n.: A Spanish computer scientist who co-created key neural methods for translation and image captioning, led DeepMind's StarCraft-playing AlphaStar, co-led Google's Gemini models, and in 2026 co-founded the startup Discovery Loop., knowledge distillationknowledge distillation, n.: Training a smaller or cheaper 'student' AI to copy the behavior of a larger 'teacher' AI, so the student keeps much of the teacher's skill while being faster to run.. In August 2026 he left Google to co-found Discovery Loop, a public-benefit company aiming to automate scientific discovery, with Ghemawat, Vinyals and Quoc Le. With Ghemawat he received the 2012 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award (now the ACM Prize in Computing) and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2021).