creators

Jeff Dean - co-founder and CEO of Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean left Google in August 2026 after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop. He built MapReduce, Bigtable and TensorFlow and led Google Brain.

Jeffrey Adgate Dean, born 23 July 1968 in Hawaii, is an American computer scientist. He took a BS summa cum laude in computer science and economics at the University of Minnesota in 1990 and a computer science PhD at the University of Washington in 1996, working before that at the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS and at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Laboratory. He joined Google in 1999 as one of its earliest engineers and co-designed much of the infrastructure large web services are now built on: MapReduce, Bigtable, Spanner, Protocol Buffers and LevelDB. He co-founded Google Brain in 2011 and led it from 2012, co-designing DistBelief and then TensorFlow. After Brain and DeepMind merged in 2023 he became Google's chief scientist. His honours include the ACM Prize in Computing (2012) and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2021). On 5 August 2026 Google announced that Dean would leave after almost 27 years. He co-founded Discovery Loop, a company building AI systems that run experimental loops automatically, starting with machine learning research itself; the founding team is Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals. His X profile describes him as "Co-founder & CEO of Discovery Loop. Former Chief Scientist, Google." In June 2026 he gave the commencement address to the University of Washington's Allen School.

Specialization

distributed systems, deep learning infrastructure, large-scale machine learning, AI for science

Country

United States