«Jeff Dean's PIN is the last 4 digits of pi.»

I had not read this before, but told many students the same about my PIN code and I a quiz about the last digits. Love it.

Those are all fake, part of an internal Google narrative that overstates individual contribution, and obscures the work of large engineering teams.

Here are some Jeff Dean well sourced facts:

- Already part of engineering of Google indexing systems that lacked basic checksums and ran on non-ECC hardware, allowing silent data corruption.

- One of the authors of LevelDB a database with so many documented crash-consistency, recovery, and data-loss weaknesses for years. Just check their Github project. LevelDB current tracker contains unresolved crash consistency, recovery and corruption reports going back almost 12 years on GitHub

- In AI engineering technical lead, let TensorFlow lose researcher mind share to PyTorch, and caused Google fragmented landscape across TensorFlow and JAX.

- Had the people at Google who invented the Transformer architecture, but failed, to turn that lead into the first dominant public LLM.

- As AI engineering and VP management let Google Brain and DeepMind remain duplicated and internally competitive for too long.

- Let Noam Shazeer leave and then spent heavily to bring him back with nothing to show for.

- Part of Technical VP leadership who had Bard rushed to launch with factual errors in Google own promotional material.

- The first Gemini demonstration overstated how real-time and interactive the system actually was, being basically a fake.

- Part of the VP and AI technical leadership who had Google AI Overviews launched with weak source quality controls and repeated satire and low-quality web content as factual advice.

- Part of teams that launched AlphaChip performance claims that were difficult for outside researchers to reproduce and remain technically disputed.

- Jeff Dean public explanation of Gebru departure was contested and damaged confidence in Google scientific governance.

- Jeff Dean was part of the team at Google that removed or marginalized prominent internal AI ethics critics shortly before many of their warnings became product problems.

- Jeff Dean was one of the managers behind Project Dragonfly supporting censorship.

- Jeff Dean is part of the VP technical leadership approving Project Nimbus supporting an ongoing genocide.