Google's Chief Scientist Jeff Dean Leaves After Three Decades

Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist and one of its earliest employees, has left the company after three decades. He co-founded Google Brain in 2011 and was instrumental in building the AI infrastructure that powers many of Google's services.

Dean posted a photo on his last day at Google, showing two items he handed back: a scuffed black laptop with various stickers representing his work history, including TensorFlow and BigTable, and his plastic-sleeved badge with his face on it. The caption was brief: 'Turned it in…'

The laptop, a Chromebook, has been Dean's daily driver for around five years, according to him.

Dean will be joining Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le to co-found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation backed by Alphabet, Radical Ventures, and Khosla Ventures. The company aims to automate the experimental loop itself, running thousands of AI-designed experiments in parallel across machine learning, chip design, and drug discovery.

Google's CEO Sundar Pichai called it a 'privilege' to have worked alongside Dean and Ghemawat, and Alphabet is providing compute for the first year.