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Machine Heart Report

Editors: Du Wei, Jia Qi

Today, Jeff Dean has become the head of Google AI, and Google has moved from a small office space to its headquarters in Bay View, California.

Google chief scientist Jeff Dean is entering his 25th year at the tech giant.

Jeff Dean joined Google in August 1999 as early employee number 20. He co-founded the Google Brain team in 2011 to focus on advances in intelligent machines. Since then, his focus has shifted to research, systems, and applications in AI and ML, and has led the direction of the broader AI/ML and computer science research community.

In December 2020, Jeff Dean won the 2021 IEEE von Neumann Award in recognition of his contributions to the science and engineering of large-scale distributed computer systems and artificial intelligence systems. In April 2023, Google announced the merger of its Google Brain and DeepMind to form Google DeepMind. Jeff Dean serves as the chief scientist of the department.

Today, to celebrate his 25th anniversary at Google, Jeff Dean tweeted some stories from the early days of Google (told in the first person).

25 years ago today, I officially joined a small search engine company in a tiny space above what is now a T-Mobile store in downtown Palo Alto. Since then, I have had the privilege of working with amazing colleagues and building software that is used by billions of people around the world.

Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999, just one year after Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google (September 1998). It can be said that Jeff Dean is a veteran of Google.

I am very grateful to all my current and former colleagues. With your help, Google has grown into what it is today. The first office I ever worked in was like this:

Below is my current office building. This is my 16th office location at Google. It can be said that I have moved more times than 98.88% of Google employees.

There is an interesting website inside the company, where you can check what percentage of employees in the company joined later than you. Now my score has reached five 9s (99.999%), but our engineering team is also full of veteran employees, and everyone's score is infinite 9s.

Next, Jeff Dean shared some interesting stories that no one knew.

Google DeepMind's Vice President of Research and Head of Deep Learning urged for more updates on the spot.

In the early days of Google, when we were all working in Building Zero, Lucas Pereira maintained a “crayon chart” that showed the number of queries Google received, and it was updated every day.

As Google grew, this chart gradually shrank, starting with 10x, then 2x, 5x, etc. People added different "milestones" to the chart (such as when Google started providing services for Go2net, etc.). Early employees would also mark their joining time on this chart, for example, the August 9th marked by the red arrow was written by me. You should know that the "crayon charts" in these pictures were originally posted on the wall, and they were ten meters long.

In Building Zero, we installed high-end Japanese Toto smart toilets, each cubicle was equipped with an infrared remote control to control the functions. It turned out that the reflective paint on the toilet ceiling caused the infrared signal to reflect, resulting in the control of toilets in other cubicles at inappropriate times.

Soon after, we switched to having just one remote-controlled toilet per cubicle, a practice we've continued in probably every Google building.

Jeff Dean’s Reminiscing About the Past resonates and brings back memories for many people.

Someone said that thanks to the search engine (Google) that had not yet developed, I met my wife from the other side of the world 20 years ago.

Some people also recalled their first meeting with Jeff Dean at the 2015 NeurIPS conference. He was so approachable, and he is still the same now. Congratulations to Jeff Dean for achieving such fruitful results in this "small" search engine company.

When asked how he got from compiler research to early Google work, Jeff Dean said that before joining Google, he worked at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Laboratory (WRL), which was only two blocks away from the DEC Systems Research Center (SRC) laboratory.

AltaVista (focusing on full-text web retrieval and providing classified directory search) was designed and created by DEC WRL and DEC SRC. When he joined DEC, some colleagues had already built a web graph from the data captured by AltaVista. He then began to study how to use the web graph structure to find relevant pages on the web with Monika Henzinger, former director of research at Google. Since compiler algorithms are often closely related to various types of graphs, this is not as big a leap as it seems (web-based information retrieval has just begun to exploit web graph structures in various ways, such as PageRank, etc.).

In addition, Jeff Dean shared which office building has the best coffee in the past 25 years. He has good memories of B43, where he would rush to get coffee with a group of people every morning (if you don’t come before 9:07, you will miss the coffee truck).

Jeff Dean's recollection also prompted LeCun to send a congratulatory message: In Silicon Valley, 25 years seems like a century.

Google has also grown from such a small showcase to the technology giant it is today.

参考链接：https://medium.com/hackernoon/this-is-going-to-be-huge-google-founders-collection-comes-to-chm-27356256731