Jeff Dean worked at Google for 27 years.
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Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, one of the company's most respected engineers and executives, is leaving the search giant as part of a broader AI leadership shake-up at the search giant.Naturally, employees have had something to say about his shock departure.Googlers peppered the company's central message board with memes and posts about Dean's departure, according to several posts seen by Business Insider. Some of them riffed on "Jeff Dean Facts" — a running gag where staff post ridiculous and exaggerated "facts" about Dean's mythical status."Google is not losing Jeff Dean. Google is finally open-sourcing him for humanity," one of the memes read."Leaves Google so ML advances can catch up to Jeff Dean," read another, referring to machine learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence.Dean's status both inside and outside Google is legendary. One of the company's earliest employees, Dean wrote significant parts of Google's search infrastructure and cofounded the Google Brain AI unit. He was also a technical co-lead on Google's Gemini project.Dean said on Wednesday that he was leaving to cofound his own AI startup along with three other top Google researchers, including Dean's longtime collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat.
