Jeff Dean

Co-founder & CEO of Discovery Loop. Former Chief Scientist, Google. Helped build many Google products, TPUs, Gemini, TensorFlow, MapReduce, Bigtable, ...

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

In April, '17, @jsomers of @NewYorker reached out & said he wanted to do a small profile of me & my longtime colleague Sanjay Ghemawat, watch us work for a few hours, maybe dinner, etc.

It came out today. I think it captures our working style really well. https://t.co/cRSMiFfwAP

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

@kotsanasmuseum Nice! I really enjoyed visiting your museum! Highly recommended if you're ever in Athens!

[Museum of Ancient Greek Technology @kotsanasmuseum]

Thank you, @JeffDean , for visiting us in Athens and sharing your experience. We’ve since added new ways to explore the mechanisms online:
https://t.co/Hk7mmdpPBq

[Axiom @axiommathai]

The largest math proof in human history is now computer-verified.

Today, Axiom announces a complete Lean auto-formalization of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups, the "periodic table of symmetry."

About 15,000 pages, built by over 100 mathematicians across generations.

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

Communicating effectively about science is really important. It's nice to see these amazing journalists recognized for their effectiveness at bringing scientific topics to life for broader audiences!

[SciComm Excellence @SciCommAwards]

Congratulations to the 2026 winners of the National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications given by @theNASEM in partnership with @schmidtsciences!

Learn more about the winners: https://t.co/5Ip1YDZRAk #scicomm

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

@kavinsoodd @evisdrenova And @Sanjay_Ghemawat!

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

@jaredlholt Just don't click the "Accept Cookies" button. Problem solved.

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

@TaliaRinger You're already an exceptional researcher. When the kids are young, there is the tension you highlight, but it gets easier when they get a bit older. In the meantime, enjoy them at their current age, because they grow up fast!

[Stephanie Zhan @stephzhan]

I’m starting a new early-stage AI fund, doing what I love: partnering with founders from company formation on bold bets, long before consensus.

The fund’s LPs will include Sequoia, Jeff Dean, Sachin Katti, Philip Wong (my Stanford professor and Chief Scientist adviser to TSMC), and others whose work has shaped our industry and how I think about AI’s future.

I’ll remain a partner at Sequoia and keep serving on my boards on Sequoia’s behalf.

Sequoia has been my home for the past 11 years. I joined as the youngest investor the firm had ever hired. I grew up here. Through years of intense debate and shared work, I found lifelong mentors and friends who took me under their wing and taught me this craft. They taught me to aim high and take big swings. I’ll carry that into what I build: outsized ambition, relentless truth-seeking and curiosity, and a refusal to become complacent.

Working alongside founders has made me want to build something of my own: a firm shaped from day one around the convictions I’ve developed over the past decade.

Life has taught me not to take time for granted. This is how I want to spend mine.

Why now

We’re seeing a new way of building companies in today’s AI era. Research and products often advance together. A breakthrough can open a market or accelerate a business far faster than expected. Some companies require extraordinary capital and compute early on. Others reach meaningful scale with remarkably small teams. The rules for how big these businesses can get, and how fast, are being rewritten.

But early on, the technology is unproven, the resources required enormous, and the vision seemingly implausible.

This is what I love most: seeing the potential right from the beginning, and helping founders realize their full scale of ambition.

More than ever, it starts with an extreme willingness to believe early, with bold, independent conviction in a founder’s technical insight before any product or market validation. Then, it means helping founders take the biggest swings, giving the rare, long-term patience to see those bets through uncertainty, ambiguity, and turbulence, and serving as a level head when the stakes are highest.

I learned this kind of partnership at Sequoia. It’s the foundation of the firm I’m building.

Believing before consensus

My fascination with AI’s potential took root at Stanford in the early-to-mid 2010s, studying computer science and working in Andrew Ng’s lab. The friendships I formed connected me to a community whose people and ideas would help shape modern AI and build some of our generation’s defining companies. What stayed with me was the gap between what those people saw was possible and what the wider world could imagine.

I’m drawn to founders pursuing ambitions that sound impossible today.

I start with a simple question: “What if everything goes right?”

Then we work backward together to make it happen.

In 2023, Deepak and Abhinav set out to build a general-purpose robot brain at @SkildAI, before physical AI was a consensus bet. Their sim-to-real breakthroughs gave me conviction where earlier robotics approaches had fallen short. But the data flywheel required deployment at scale. We made commercialization as urgent as research and brought in strategic partners like NVIDIA and SoftBank to support the ambition. Three years in, Skild is advancing the frontier of physical AI with nine figures in annualized revenue.

In 2024, Ioannis and Misha founded @reflection_ai with an insight into scaling reinforcement learning. As that grew into the ambition to build a Western frontier lab for open models, the hard question was how a startup competes with labs spending tens of billions. An introduction to NVIDIA and many compute calls and recruiting events later, the team has built Beam, now one of the leading US open models.

In 2025, Anna and Azalia, the co-creators of AlphaChip, founded @RicursiveAI to design models and hardware together. From day one, we made early customers and ecosystem partners a priority. Today, they are showing order-of-magnitude improvements on real workloads, working with some of the industry’s most consequential players, and reaching a defining inflection point.

The ambition keeps growing as these companies scale.

@linear has always had a kind of magic to it. Now it’s the system a new generation of AI companies builds on, for teams and agents alike.

@tavus saw early that we’d one day talk to AI the way we talk to each other. Today, it’s building the human computing interface for a world of AI colleagues.

@Mach_Industries began as hydrogen experiments in an MIT dorm room. It has since become one of the most exciting next-generation defense companies.

Making the ambition possible

Being a first believer is only the beginning. Compute falls through. A deep-pocketed incumbent makes your mission its top priority. A breakthrough changes the opportunity and the capital required overnight.

These are stomach-churning moments, and early belief carries a responsibility to help make the bet work.

This is the partnership I love: turning the full ambition into concrete steps. Raising capital, securing compute and strategic partners, recruiting exceptional people, and winning the first customers together. Thinking several moves ahead while solving what’s in front of us. And as breakthroughs open new possibilities, helping founders dream even bigger.

Thank you

To the founders I’ve worked with: thank you for trusting me and Sequoia to be your first partner and first believer. It’s been the joy of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to keep building together.

Thank you to Alfred and Pat for your leadership of Sequoia and your support of my next chapter. To Roelof, for bringing me into Sequoia and believing in me from the beginning. Alfred and Roelof, you have been mentors in investing and in life. So much of what I know, and the investor I’ve become, comes from your guidance and generosity over the years. To Bill, for the close partnership and wealth of knowledge, always wrapped in humility. To Shaun, for showing me how to think deeply and imaginatively. To Michael Moritz, for inspiring 22-year-old me to dream big. To Doug, for teaching me to keep things simple. To Bogie and Jess, for bringing joy to the everyday and perspective on what matters. And to all my Sequoia teammates, for the friendship, camaraderie, and lessons I’ll carry with me.

To my family, especially my husband and my brother, who have each started companies of their own: thank you for giving me the courage to take this leap.

Let’s get to work!

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

@stephzhan Congrats, @stephzhan, and very excited to be along with you on your journey!

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

@flappyairplanes Congrats to the whole team at @flappyairplanes!

[Anusha Ramesh @anurahk]

I launched the first image and video generation models at Google, and kept asking why all AI designs look the same.

AI has brought us the WORST era of design.

It made content creation effortless, but it also made 90% of it look painfully generic.

My co-founder and I spent 2 years building in stealth to change that.

Meet Vyb, the first AI design model that understands your taste like a designer would.

RT + comment your website URL and we’ll make your first design.

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

@iScienceLuvr Congrats, @iScienceLuvr and everyone at @SophontAI!

[Tanishq Mathew Abraham, Ph.D. @iScienceLuvr]

Cancer patients with the same diagnosis often have very different tumor biology.

Molecular testing can reveal underlying differences, but that's slow and expensive.

Introducing Holon-S1, our platform to predict genes and biomarkers from routine pathology slides.

• beats two other models at predicting spatial gene activity in a controlled comparison
• has identified potentially novel biomarkers in breast cancer and colon cancer
• evaluated across 16 organ types and more than 15 scanners, using slides from both formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded and fresh-frozen tissue.

We believe Holon-S1 has the potential to help researchers find new biomarkers in slides they already have, discover treatment targets, and bring more personalized cancer care within reach!

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

Have a glimpse at this! Nice work, @AndrewDai and Elorian folks!

[Andrew M. Dai @AndrewDai]

Spent years watching models ace a single image and completely whiff on anything that moves or changes angle. Today we’re fixing that.

Try Glimpse now, our first visual thinking model with competitive frontier performance compared to Astra on key public visual reasoning benchmarks.

[Stanislav Fort @stanislavfort]

My AI security research lab AISLE discovered 500+ zero-days with CVEs across 100+ codebases in a year => ~1% of 2026's open-source CVEs globally from a single team! On hardened codebases like curl, we've repeatedly matched or outperformed frontier AI labs in zero-day discovery

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

@stanislavfort Nice work, @stanislavfort / AISLE! Finding and fixing vulnerabilities quickly is becoming ever more important!

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

@SumoTail @Khipu_AI @DeepIndaba @DiscoLoopAI Indeed. From a blog post I co-authored in 2018 announcing the establishment of our Google AI Research Center in Accra.

https://t.co/ZT2oiCM8nD

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

I've been a personal supporter (through our family foundation) of @Khipu_AI & @DeepIndaba, which are fantastic events for AI researchers in Africa and South America. I've encouraged Google to support these in the past. Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI) is thrilled to support!

[Nando de Freitas @NandoDF]

For the last 10 years we've been raising funds to bring AI to Africa (@DeepIndaba) and South America (@Khipu_AI). The efforts have been very successful, but this year we are finding it hard to raise money. If you work for an AI company, please share the following with the right team to support us. Thank you!

About KHIPU 2027

What it is: KHIPU AI (https://t.co/psxMsgVsGS) is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing AI talent, research, and community across Latin America. Alongside year-round regional initiatives, we host a biennial in-person gathering rotating across the continent, previously in Uruguay (2019, 2023) and Chile (2025).

Next Edition: April 5–9, 2027, in São Paulo, Brazil, hosted at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), one of Latin America's leading research universities.

Watch our 2-minute video: https://t.co/FgoNN4JD10 (hear directly from past speakers, including Nando, and Latin American students on how KHIPU grew from a single gathering into a regional AI movement).

Who Attends & Why Support - Engaging with the region's top talent and lab leaders: We bring together around 500 participants, including leading faculty and lab directors from across Latin America alongside a curated cohort of ~300 graduate students and industry researchers selected from over 1,000 applicants. As the local AI ecosystem grows rapidly, KHIPU offers a rare opportunity to engage directly with these emerging researchers and regional leaders in one place, helping shape research priorities and the safety mindset across Latin America while connecting with talent and perspectives outside Silicon Valley.

100% free attendance & student grants: Attendance is completely free for all selected students, professors, and researchers. Sponsorship funding goes directly toward travel and accommodation grants for students and faculty across Latin America who otherwise could not afford to attend.

Community & Track Record: Past editions have featured speakers such as @Yoshua_Bengio , @JeffDean , @jpineau1 , and @NandoDF (2025 lineup: https://t.co/9KU26hLXZE), and have been supported by the Hopper-Dean Foundation, @GoogleDeepMind , @Apple , @Microsoft , @Meta, @cohere , and @MistralAI . For 2027, @OriolVinyalsML and @sarahookr are already confirmed.

2027 Sponsorship Prospectus: Attached (also available at https://t.co/EwXyCrGXWl)
Contact: @FortunatoMeire ([email protected]) & KHIPU Sponsorship Committee ([email protected])

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

@Khipu_AI @DeepIndaba @DiscoLoopAI As @NandoDF suggested, if you're at an AI company, please suggest to the appropriate person that these are worthwhile events for your company to sponsor.

[jpark @jparkjmc]

Introducing DeepRSI, a new industry standard for measuring recursive self-improvement.

On preexisting benchmarks, tasks are contributor-based and short-horizon (~12 hrs). In DeepRSI, we push agents to work 48 hours on ML tasks actually derived from ongoing proprietary research.