Jeff Dean

“I often tell students it’s better to skim 10 papers than to read one in detail because you then get 10 points in your cloud of what might be possible," Dean said yesterday at the Asian American Schol…”

“Or, even skim 100 abstracts because what you want to be able to do is connect important ideas that have not yet been connected.”

“A problem that could take 20 years to solve is probably too ambitious if you don’t have a clear idea of how to attack it, he added.”

“But a problem that can be solved in two years may be too obvious to produce a major breakthrough.”

“The perfect shape of a problem that you want to work on in a reasonably long-term manner [is] like five years or something," Dean said.”

“Dean stepped away from Google earlier this month after working at the company for 27 years, notably serving as the head of Google AI from 2018 to 2023 and Google’s chief scientist from 2023 to 2026.”

“The 58-year-old is now the cofounder and CEO of DiscoveryLoop, an AI company focused on accelerating scientific and engineering discovery.”

“Dean graduated with a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington in 1996.”