Jeff Dean

Google's Chief Scientist; built MapReduce, BigTable, TensorFlow and the TPU, and co-authored the 2014 distillation paper NeurIPS rejected that now makes Gemini's Flash models cheap. His recurring method is napkin math against a bottleneck — search-in-RAM (2001), speech-would-double-the-fleet (2013) — and his 2026 advice to founders is the 1% rule: build where models fail 0–1% of the time, not 20%