A lot of the computational plumbing that powers Google owes something to Jeff Dean. He built early versions of the company’s Web search and ad systems. And he invented MapReduce, a system for working with big data sets that triggered a major shift across the computing industry.
Dean is now laboring to reinvent the inner workings of Google and the wider world all over again. He leads the Google Brain research group, which aims to advance machine learning—the art of making software figure out how to do things for itself instead of being explicitly programmed. Software from Google Brain is now drawn on by more than 600 teams inside Google, often for internal systems invisible to consumers. But in the past year, technology originating in Google Brain has also delivered major upgrades to Google’s Web search, spam filtering, and translation services.
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