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Dwarkesh Podcast

Dwarkesh Podcast

Jeff Dean & Noam Shazeer — 25 years at Google: from PageRank to AGI

Feb 12, 2025 · 2h 15m

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About this episode

This week I welcome on the show two of the most important technologists ever, in any field. Jeff Dean is Google's Chief Scientist, and through 25 years at the company, has worked on basically the most transformative systems in modern computing: from MapReduce, BigTable, Tensorflow, AlphaChip, to Gemini. Noam Shazeer invented or co-invented all the main architectures and techniques that are used for modern LLMs: from the Transformer itself, to Mixture of Experts, to Mesh Tensorflow, to Gemini and many other things. We talk about their 25 years at Google, going from PageRank to MapReduce to the Transformer to MoEs to AlphaChip – and maybe soon to ASI. My favorite part was Jeff's vision for…