Jeff Dean & Noam Shazeer
Episode publishedPodcast: Dwarkesh PodcastDwarkesh Podcast
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Today, I have the honor of chatting with Jeff Dean and Noam Shazir. Jeff is Google's chief scientist. And through his twenty five years at the company, he has worked on basically the most transformative systems in modern computing from MapReduce, BigTable, TensorFlow, Alpha Chip. Genuinely, the list doesn't end. Gemini now. And Noam is the per single person most responsible for the current AI revolution. He has been the inventor or the co inventor of all the main, architectures and techniques that are used for modern LLMs from the transformer itself to mixture of experts, to mesh tensorflow to
for having us. Super excited to be here.
Okay. First question. Both of you have been in Google for twenty five or close to twenty five years. At some point early on in the company, you probably understood how everything worked. Mhmm. When did that stop being the case? Do you feel like there was a clear moment that happened?
I mean, I I know I joined, and, like, at that point, this was, like, February and, they had this thing, everybody gets a mentor. And, you know, so, you know, I knew nothing. I would just ask my mentor everything, and my mentor knew everything. It turned out my mentor was Jeff, and it was not the case that everyone at Google knew everything. It was just the case that Jeff knew everything because he because he has basically written everything. You're
you're very kind. I mean, I think, as companies grow, you you kind of go through these phases. Like, when I joined, you know, we were 25 people, 26 people, something like that. And so you eventually learned everyone's name. And even though we were growing, you kept track of all the people who were joining. At some point, then you kind of lose track of everyone's name in the company, but you still know everyone working on, you know, software engineering things. Then you sort of lose track of, you know, all the names of people in the software engineering group, but, you know, you at least know a
it's a very good surprise. Like, you're like, wow. Project platypus. Like, if platypus no idea we were doing that, and, and it turns out You know, really
It is good to keep track of, like, what's going on in the company even at a very high level, even if you don't know every last detail. And it's good to know lots of people throughout the company so that you can go ask someone for more details or figure out who to talk to. I think, like, with one level of indirection, you can usually find the right person in the company if you have a good, you know, network of people that you've built up over time.
How did Google recruit you, by the way?
I kind of reached out to them, actually. And
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