Jeff Dean takes over as Google’s AI chief

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/4/3/17191944/google-ai-head-jeff-dean-reshuffle-john-giannandrea

by quazar • 8 years ago

290 132 8 years ago

perfmode2• 8 years ago

Jeff Dean is arguably one of the top 3 most productive and influential industry programmers of all time.

aje4032• 8 years ago

He certainly has the reputation. Are there any stories of people who've worked with him in person floating around (sans Chuck Norris jokes)? Would be curious to read. Have seen stories of Carmack and guys like that have cemented the legend.

emtel2• 8 years ago

A former co-worker of mine was Jeff Dean's "mentor" at (I think) mysimon.com, where Jeff worked before google. He said that when Jeff started, he showed him how to check out code, and then basically just listened to Jeff typing furiously for about 6 weeks. Then, he gave a presentation to the eng team that was basically like "Ok I sped up the system by 20x, here's how." Then he quit and went to google.

enitihas2• 8 years ago

Just curious, who do you think are the other two?

kirillseva2• 8 years ago

I'd definitely put John Carmack on the list, probably as #1. And I think antirez should be somewhere up there as well

hknd• 8 years ago

Sanjay Ghemawat is another one.

hooluupog• 8 years ago

Not the OP,maybe Bill Joy and John Carmack.

trimbo• 8 years ago

Another nominee is Doug Cutting

throwaway_80bf3• 8 years ago

Anders Hejlsberg?

mcphage• 8 years ago

Bill Atkinson, maybe?

boundlessdreamz• 8 years ago

Fabrice Bellard - https://bellard.org/

bhaavan• 8 years ago

In a leadership role, it will be difficult for him to contribute technically IMO. I wish he remained a programmer, and continued using his abilities to solve greater things.

antisocial3• 8 years ago

I am sure all the people he will be leading are passionate, he may not have to deal with the run of the mill org issues. Being promoted gives him more influence/power to implement his vision.

aje4032• 8 years ago

Na, it makes perfect sense, especially if the person isn't socially retarded or unfit for management. They're able to contribute meaningfully to broad architectural designs to have a larger impact then hacking away at a single project, which also imparts their thought process to a larger group of developers who may end up in his shoes one day. Ideally someone in his shoes can recognize top talent and ideas as well, and clear organization barriers away for individuals and groups to achieve large things as well. Besides, people with his ability and experience should know everything that is going on to influence what the company chooses to do with its money and time over a political bonehead.

freyir• 8 years ago

He was already in a leadership role (he led Google Brain). Now he's just in a bigger leadership role.

John42342• 8 years ago

This is a myth spread by people who can not code.

dpflan2• 8 years ago

Have you read Coders at Work [1]? There are 15 computer scientists interviewed (listed below). Perhaps it's time for another edition with Dean, Carmack, and others.

Coders at Work Interviewee List:

- Jamie Zawinski

- Brad Fitzpatrick

- Douglas Crockford

- Brendan Eich

- Joshua Bloch

- Joe Armstrong

- Simon Peyton Jones

- Peter Norvig

- Guy Steele

- Dan Ingalls

- L Peter Deutsch

- Ken Thompson

- Fran Allen

- Bernie Cosell

- Donald Knuth

[1] http://codersatwork.com/

auvi• 8 years ago

interesting to note that Jamie Zawinski, Peter Norvig, Guy Steele and L Peter Deutsch are all lispers

fizwhiz• 8 years ago

4 of these guys are Google employees right now:

- Brad Fitzpatrick - Joshua Bloch - Peter Norvig - Ken Thompson

mundanevoice2• 8 years ago

Brad is amazing. He has contributed so much back to the OSS and written excellent code. A true hero, also the youngest of the lot in the book.

foobaw• 8 years ago

Just a humorous thought: imagine getting all of their resumes for a software engineer position. How do you even interview these people or even choose one for that matter?

breck• 8 years ago

If you like CAW another good one is Masterminds of Programming.

John42342• 8 years ago

The author of the "Coders at Work" was asked why he did not have interview at Carmack in one of the talks and his reply was he had contacted him but Carmack did not reply back and he said that with a very bad attitude as though Carmack owes him.

sah2ed• 8 years ago

Would Dave Cutler make your list ;)?

https://news.microsoft.com/features/the-engineers-engineer-c...

eismcc2• 8 years ago

Right. He basically made AMD64 happen because he didn’t like Itanium.

meddlepal• 8 years ago

Yes, he should be in any top 5/10 list of most influential software engineers.

gaius4• 8 years ago

Such a shame then that that talent is focused on making people click ads

pebers• 8 years ago

Like Bigtable, MapReduce and Tensorflow haven't had any impact outside advertising...

antisocial3• 8 years ago

They open source all their excellent work. Rent seeking cable providers are trying to take advantage of the net neutrality repeal to make people click ads.

jonknee2• 8 years ago

It could be worse, a couple generations ago the best minds were used to find new ways to kill people.

CydeWeys3• 8 years ago

Aren't you forgetting the vast majority of Google's products that aren't ads, like Search, Maps, Android, Gmail, etc.?

vikascoder• 8 years ago

Of all the hate that Advertising gets, how will any business survive without Advertising? How does an ad free world look like? You pay for every service as a ad-free subscription model? But how would you come to know such a service exists without Advertising?

bitmapbrother• 8 years ago

Such a shame then that that talent is focused on making people click ads

Alphabet's Project Loon was providing connectivity to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. What were the other SV companies, that did nothing to help out, working on?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/how-google-is-us...

wpasc• 8 years ago

Jeff Dean writes directly in binary and provides the source code as documentation for other developers.

VikingCoder• 8 years ago

https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-facts

My favorite: Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers.

Consultant32452• 8 years ago

LOL, Jeff Dean's pin number is the last 4 digits of pi.

notoriousjpg• 8 years ago

Cricket matches used to take 5 days, until Jeff optimized them.

Unfortunately some matches still take 5 days. Test matches!

joseraul• 8 years ago

Rumors say he writes code in zcat to go faster.

pm90• 8 years ago

Seeing the comments, I can't but imagine what kind of personality is needed to not be affected by that kind of reputation and recognition. Like everyone expects everything you do or say to be really smart. I guess its kind of like being a celebrity; but instead of looking or acting good you have to be smart all the time.

Edit: Also, how is Peter Norvig not Google's AI chief???

svantana• 8 years ago

Norvig's title is "Director of Research", presumably this is a different position than "AI Chief". Source: http://www.norvig.com/

dekhn• 8 years ago

And to be clear, he is a Director of Research, not the Director of Research. There is more than one.

srtjstjsj• 8 years ago

Why would he be?

jedberg2• 8 years ago

I can't but imagine what kind of personality is needed to not be affected by that kind of reputation and recognition.

The reason many Harvard grads keep the fact that they went to Harvard to themselves is because they have a similar expectation -- that everything they say will be brilliant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q51ld-scMI8

mehrdadn• 8 years ago

Ouch :-)

debt• 8 years ago

"Edit: Also, how is Peter Norvig not Google's AI chief???"

I would imagine Norvig as more a thinker and less of a doer. I think Google has reached a point where their flavor of AI works sufficiently well where now the only problem left is getting buy-in from as many teams as possible within Google.

Jeff Dean might be more decision-maker, politically connected(internally at Google) and less of a thinker-type in moving this initiative forward. They're both extremely valuable just in different ways.

It's one thing to build it(AI) but an entire other problem to get the AI into Google's huge suite of internal/external systems and products.

oh-kumudo• 8 years ago

Also, how is Peter Norvig not Google's AI chief

He is not doing any pratical AI stuff at this moment. Jeff is still productive AF even approaching his 50s.

ronald_raygun• 8 years ago

That's not a great thing to say. Why wouldn't a 50 year old be productive?

ebikelaw2• 8 years ago

For what it's worth, there is no "AI" division at Google. That term just doesn't enjoy any currency inside the company.

kozikow2• 8 years ago

Brain, DeepMind and MI are mostly researchy. I know some people working on applied deep learning that got shuffled multiple times between PAs in the last year - it seems to be the solution for this exact problem.

riku_iki2• 8 years ago

What is MI?..

onetimemanytime2• 8 years ago

off topic: how much do you think a guy like Jeff Dean is worth? 18-19 years at Google, pre-IPO and a super-programmer. Keeping in mind that Google paid Anthony Levandowski $120 Mil and Uber way more than that (technically Uber bought his company and maybe a hard drive :))

More than $500 Mil?

lisper• 8 years ago

Jeff is priceless.

dmix5• 8 years ago

Levandowski got $120M through acquisition, not salary as an engineer, did he not?

Anyway, there was an old article about top salaries at Google that speculated Jeff making $3M/yr [1].

Jeff also angel invested in Teleport, which got acquired [2]. And his wife and him also have a philanthropy foundation that recently donated $1M to MIT [3] (to promote diversity).

Any more recent employee stock options he gained and past IPO returns could obviously vary significantly depending on percentages, length of time, etc. But I'd be surprised if it was as high as $500M...

[1] https://www.itworld.com/article/2693353/man-or-myth-the-3-mi...

[2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/teleport-2

[3] https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2016/8/10/one-of-goo...

puzzle2• 8 years ago

Jeff was between employee 20 and 30, IIRC, so it's hard to imagine him not having made many millions with the stock. On the other hand, he's the guy who kept his Volvo for well over a decade.

onetimemanytime2• 8 years ago

We're all guessing, but his net-worth probably didn't come from his salary. He joined Google 1-3 years after Google was founded so we have to assume that he got a lot of stock options, especially given his talent. When Google IPO-ed in 2004 it had a market cap of $23 Billion. Today is 30 times that much.

Of course he might have sold shares, but then he might have gotten super bonuses for a lot of his projects. Maybe he asked to leave and Sergey and Larry gave him a new title and lot of money. Sometime a small tweak makes a Google-sized company billions or tens of billions. They are generous with a tiny % of the sum.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/03/waymos-uber-lawsuit-reveals-...

"Embattled engineer Anthony Levandowski collected $120 million from Google, despite involvement with at least one start-up that would ultimately compete with the company, according to new legal filings. "

kolpa6• 8 years ago

Levandowski got $120m in pay from Google. His acquistion was when Uber acquired Otto

kolpa6• 8 years ago

Google is worth $700B and Jeff Dean was employee ~20, a senior engineer and manager/VP. >0.1% equity for someone of that stature is not unlikely -- mid-level engineers at early-stage startups get about 0.1% equity.

known• 8 years ago

I prefer a Hollywood Director as my AI Chief

dmix5• 8 years ago

FYI Jeff Dean gave a lecture at YC on AI last summer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcStlHGpjN8

swah• 8 years ago

I'd love to see a long coding stream from Jeff or another senior Googler, that demoed all the tools they use and the infrastructure they have available to develop and test new code...

bmbelgod• 8 years ago

Not exactly a coding stream, but a good overview of the tools he uses regularly https://usesthis.com/interviews/jeff.dean/

efitz• 8 years ago

I read this and thought - that's going to be a big culture shift, Jeffrey Dean Morgan taking over Google's AI: https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/walking-dead-...

dpflan2• 8 years ago

I think an affinity for "brains" still holds here. ;) [as long as my zombie allusion holds...]

jamestimmins• 8 years ago

I'm curious what this means practically. What will he be doing all day? Is it still research or code writing, or at this level is he focused on managing people and projects at a high level? If the latter, what does that even mean?

filereaper• 8 years ago

So many chiefs.

Jeff Dean is the AI Chief, and Fei Fei Li is the Chief Scientist of AI/ML

Not sure what the distinction is, but good for both of them.

slivym• 8 years ago

Presumably there are some googlers around here that can explain the difference in detail,but Fei Fei Li is R&D in Google Cloud whereas Jeff Dean is taking the organisational role as head of AI. So much more of the organisation will be involved - some product development, marketing, operations etc. as well a R&D.

nojvek• 8 years ago

The list of mostly dudes seen as programmers worth worship makes me sad. Most great software is usually written implicitly or explicitly as a team.

Here’s a name for a start. Jessie Frazelle. Very influencial in the Kubernetes project. I’d love to see a list of “industry changing” female programmers. Mostly because it’s 2018 and we need to change the perceptions that “great software can only be written by men”

ironfootnz• 8 years ago

I believe was worthy. Jeff Dean deserves it.

Jeff Dean takes over as Google’s AI chief

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