Jeff Dean & Noam Shazeer — 25 years at Google: from PageRank to AGI - Dwarkesh Podcast Recap

Podcast: Dwarkesh Podcast

Published: 2025-02-12

Duration: 2 hr 15 min

Summary

In this episode, Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer reflect on their 25 years at Google, discussing the evolution of the company and their pivotal roles in advancing AI technologies. They share insights on the challenges and opportunities that shaped their work, particularly in the context of hardware advancements and algorithm development.

What Happened

The podcast kicks off with host Dwarkesh introducing two tech luminaries: Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer, both of whom have played crucial roles in Google's journey over the past 25 years. Jeff, as Google's chief scientist, has been instrumental in groundbreaking projects like MapReduce, BigTable, TensorFlow, and AlphaGo, while Noam is credited as a key figure behind the AI revolution and one of the co-leads of Google's Gemini project. Their discussion dives into the early days of Google, where both shared experiences of navigating a rapidly growing company and the shift in company dynamics over time.

As they reminisce about their recruitment stories, Noam recalls a casual decision to send a resume to Google in 2000, believing it was already a massive entity. He was surprised to find a vibrant team of smart individuals working on meaningful problems. Jeff echoes this sentiment, noting the transition from knowing every employee in a small team to being surprised by new projects like