Ex-Google chief scientist tells Gen Z the trick is not to master AI—instead, just ‘skim papers’

Trying to keep up with AI developments can feel like a losing game, and Jeff Dean, who has spent the last three decades working on the new technology at Google , says Gen Z shouldn’t even try to master it all.

Instead, his advice is simple: Skim widely and look for connections others might miss.

“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 Scholar Forum’s 2026 Frontier & Pioneer Symposium in his first public talk since leaving Google.

“Or, even skim 100 abstracts because what you want to be able to do is connect important ideas that have not yet been connected.” For young people entering the tech field, Dean’s advice is less about cutting corners than learning how to use time wisely and think broadly.

That approach, he said, can identify solutions to problems that previously seemed unsolvable—and help narrow an appropriate timeline.

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.

“Try lots of things that might not work.

Some of them will.” AI can put Ph.D.-level expertise in everyone’s hands, according to Dean 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.

Despite predictions that the technology could lead to massive unemployment and widening wealth inequality , Dean remains bullish on AI’s potential to improve lives.

“The vast majority of the uses of these models is incredibly positive for the world.

Like advancing AI in healthcare and AI in education…being able to make people able to solve problems they couldn’t solve on their own will make people able to do more,” Dean said.