Jeff Dean
A legendary Google engineer who co-founded Google Brain and served as Google DeepMind's chief scientist, before leaving in August 2026 to start Discovery Loop.
Jeff Dean is one of the most influential engineers of the modern internet era, and was famous inside Google long before AI was. With Sanjay Ghemawat he built much of the infrastructure that still runs the company, then in 2011 co-founded Google Brain, the US research unit that pushed Google into deep learning. When Google merged Brain with DeepMind in 2023, he became chief scientist of the combined lab and co-led the development of Gemini.
In August 2026 he left Google along with Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le to launch Discovery Loop, a startup focused on machine learning, science and engineering breakthroughs. Google invested in it anyway, which tells you something about how these departures work at that level.