Jeff Dean's first public talk since leaving Google: RSI, automated discovery, and AI safety
dawnsongtweets · x · 2026-09-21
Dawn Song sat down with Jeff Dean for his first public talk since leaving Google after 27 years, revisiting his role in MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow, Mixture-of-Experts, TPUs, and Gemini. The 8-post thread covers how to spot foundational ideas early, choosing research problems worth 5 years, what coding teaches about reasoning models, what recursive self-improvement might look like, automating the scientific discovery loop (and his new startup's role in it), keeping increasingly autonomous AI safe, and what the next generation of researchers should work on.
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