Why Jeff Dean says he left Google after 27 years to build a 4-person AI startup
Google's outgoing chief scientist, Jeff Dean.
THOMAS SAMSON/AFP via Getty Images Jeff Dean, the former chief scientist at Google, left the company earlier this month after 27 years.
Dean is now building his own small AI startup called Discovery Loop.
Dean said small startups have key advantages over Big Tech companies.
After 27 years, it must have been hard for Jeff Dean to let go.
Dean, who quit Google to build his own AI startup called Discovery Loop, briefly choked up while describing his decision to leave the search giant after more than a quarter-century during a talk at Stanford University earlier this month.
"They have a plan for making the Gemini models awesome," Dean says in a video of the event released on Tuesday, flashing a thumbs up while appearing to choke back tears.
The talk, held on August 7, was his first public appearance since leaving Google.
Though Dean built a sterling reputation at Google, leading numerous high-profile projects, he said during the talk that being part of a small startup — four people in Discovery Loop's case — was now not only possible but an optimized vehicle for accelerated innovation.
Pointing toward the growing availability of cloud compute, Dean said that smaller startups can now "rely on" Google and other cloud providers to "build out the infrastructure" necessary to power AI work.
"That makes it possible for a small set of people to raise a fair bit of capital and be able to use those platforms without having to build them themselves," he said.
Working on a smaller team, Dean said, will also allow his startup to cut through "slight distractions" that would ordinarily hamper progress in large organizations.
"We're super excited as a small company about working in a really focused way on science and engineering automation," he said.
More small companies have been popping up recently as AI agents prove capable of automating processes that once required the work of multiple employees.
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