Jeff Dean & Noam Shazeer – 25 years at Google: from PageRank to AGI
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 Pathways, Google’s grand plan for a mutually-reinforcing loop of hardware and algorithmic design and for going past autoregression. That culminates in us imagining *all* of Google-the-company, going through one huge MoE model.And Noam just bites every bullet: 100x world GDP soon; let’s get a million automated researchers running in the Google datacenter; living to see the year 3000.Watch on Youtube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.SponsorsScale partners with major AI labs like Meta, Google Deepmind, and OpenAI. Through Scale’s Data Foundry, labs get access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities. If you’re an AI researcher or engineer, learn about how Scale’s Data Foundry and research lab, SEAL, can help you go beyond the current frontier at scale.com/dwarkeshCurious how Jane Street teaches their new traders? They use Figgie, a rapid-fire card game that simulates the most exciting parts of markets and trading. It’s become so popular that Jane Street hosts an inter-office Figgie championship every year. Download from the app store or play on your desktop at figgie.comMeter wants to radically improve the digital world we take for granted. They’re developing a foundation model that automates network management end-to-end. To do this, they just announced a long-term partnership with Microsoft for tens of thousands of GPUs, and they’re recruiting a world class AI research team. To learn more, go to meter.com/dwarkeshTo sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkeshpatel.com/p/advertiseTimestamps00:00:00 - Intro00:02:44 - Joining Google in 199900:05:36 - Future of Moore's Law00:10:21 - Future TPUs00:13:13 - Jeff’s undergrad thesis: parallel backprop00:15:10 - LLMs in 200700:23:07 - “Holy s**t” moments00:29:46 - AI fulfills Google’s original mission00:34:19 - Doing Search in-context00:38:32 - The internal coding model00:39:49 - What will 2027 models do?00:46:00 - A new architecture every day?00:49:21 - Automated chip design and intelligence explosion00:57:31 - Future of inference scaling01:03:56 - Already doing multi-datacenter runs01:22:33 - Debugging at scale01:26:05 - Fast takeoff and superalignment01:34:40 - A million evil Jeff Deans01:38:16 - Fun times at Google01:41:50 - World compute demand in 203001:48:21 - Getting back to modularity01:59:13 - Keeping a giga-MoE in-memory02:04:09 - All of Google in one model02:12:43 - What’s missing from distillation02:18:03 - Open research, pros and cons02:24:54 - Going the distance Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe
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