
Jeff Dean takes over as Google’s AI chief - quazar
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/4/3/17191944/google-ai-head-jeff-dean-reshuffle-john-giannandrea
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pm90
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???

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jedberg
> 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q51ld-scMI8)

~~~
mehrdadn
Ouch :-)

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swah
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...

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

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcStlHGpjN8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcStlHGpjN8)

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efitz
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-...](https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/walking-dead-jeffrey-
dean-morgan-negan-season-7.jpg?w=1000&h=563&crop=1)

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

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

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

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

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tejasmanohar
While antirez is a great programmer, I think his accomplishments are far from
that of Dean or Carmack. There are many notable folks in his playing field.

~~~
kirillseva
I disagree. For example, homebrew isn't the best package manager. But its vast
reach is a feat of its own.

Same with redis. Is it the best DB ever? Probably not. But it is definitely
used quite a bit in the industry and a lot of people get acquainted with nosql
databases and k/v stores through redis.

Engineering accomplishments without proper marketing, education and adoption
are quite useless, for better or for worse

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nojvek
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”

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filereaper
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
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.

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onetimemanytime
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?

~~~
dmix
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...](https://www.itworld.com/article/2693353/man-or-myth-
the-3-million-google-engineer.html)

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

[3] [https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2016/8/10/one-of-
goo...](https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2016/8/10/one-of-googles-top-
programmers-has-made-stem-diversity-a-phi.html)

~~~
onetimemanytime
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-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/03/waymos-uber-lawsuit-reveals-
anthony-levandowskis-120m-pay.html)

"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. "

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jamestimmins
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?

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ironfootnz
I believe was worthy. Jeff Dean deserves it.

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

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VikingCoder
[https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-
facts](https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-facts)

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

~~~
Consultant32452
LOL, Jeff Dean's pin number is the last 4 digits of pi.

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known
I prefer a Hollywood Director as my AI Chief

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

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kozikow
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.

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riku_iki
What is MI?..

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kozikow
MI - machine intelligence. Actually, it sounds like the article actually means
MI when it says AI. John Giannandrea mentioned in the article used to be a
head of "search & MI". So it makes sense that Jeff Dean would become a head of
MI.

~~~
riku_iki
This is a cool name, I think people should use it more widely instead of AI.

