近日，谷歌宣布對旗下人工智慧部門進行重大調整，任職27年的首席科學家傑夫·迪恩將離開公司。消息公布後，谷歌A股一度下跌逾5%。
迪恩將創辦一家名為Discovery Loop的AI初創公司，專注於自動化科學研究流程。與他同行的還有三位谷歌資深科學家，Alphabet將向該公司提供雲計算資源並參與投資。
Announcing Discovery Loop! I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators @Sanjay_Ghemawat , @OriolVinyalsML and @quocleix , we are founding Discovery Loop ( @DiscoLoopAI ), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world’s most used products, infrastructure and AI models, and we’re excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavor.
公開資料顯示，迪恩於1999年作為谷歌第30號員工加入，推動了多項關鍵技術轉型。他於2011年聯合創辦了谷歌大腦，主導開發了為大型語言模型提供算力支撐的TPU晶片。與他同行的三位科學家背景同樣顯赫：Vinyals是AlphaFold的主要貢獻者之一，Le共同指導了曾獲金牌級成績的AI系統，Ghemawat則與迪恩共同構建了谷歌的分布式系統基礎架構。
Tomorrow will be my last day at Google after 27 years, and watching it grow from 25 people to 190,000+ has been an amazing journey. Below is a note I shared with many people internally at Google today. An excerpt is: It has been an absolute pleasure to work with you and to help build some of the most widely used and impactful products of all time. As a kid, I dreamed of helping build software that would be used by many people, and Google now has thirteen products used by more than a billion people (amazing!). Our work has had a tremendous impact in the world, and I have been lucky enough to collaborate and form friendships with many colleagues that I deeply admire, respect, and enjoy. It still brings me joy every time I see people out in the world using our products to find information, handle email, translate documents, watch videos, learn new things, navigate and understand the physical world, browse the web, use their phone, run large-scale computations on our infrastructure, ride in an autonomous vehicle, or perform complex tasks with the help of our AI systems. I hope you all share this sense of joy, because it is a shared accomplishment! Thank you to all of my colleagues at Google over many years! Now I'm excited to go start @DiscoLoopAI with my longtime friends and colleagues @Sanjay_Ghemawat , @OriolVinyalsML , and @quocleix . (Updated post: slightly redacted to not have some personal info)
迪恩隨後發推宣布離職，表示「明天將是自己在谷歌的最後一天」。在27年裡，他見證了公司從25人成長為超19萬員工的科技巨頭。他在告別信中寫道，能夠與同事共事並打造出影響力巨大的產品是莫大的榮幸，並對這些讓他欽佩的同事和朋友表達了感謝。
