Jeff Dean's first public talk since leaving Google: research bets, coding, and RSI with Dawn Song
GregoryDiamos · x · 2026-09-22
Dawn Song sat down with Jeff Dean for his first public talk since leaving Google after 27 years, where he helped shape modern computing and AI — from MapReduce and Bigtable to TensorFlow, Mixture-of-Experts, TPUs, and Gemini.
The conversation covered big open questions:
- How to recognize a foundational idea before everyone else
- How to pick a research problem worth 5 years of your life
- What coding teaches us about building better reasoning models
- What recursive self-improvement (RSI) might actually look like
- What happens when scientific discovery hits its limits
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