At Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, on Oct. 28, Jeff Dean closed an AI event themed "Confronting Our AI Future: Hope, Fear, and the Choices Ahead." Dean joined Google in 1999 as its 30th employee and spent 27 years there until leaving in August as chief scientist, building the company's AI infrastructure through work on the Gemini AI model and the custom Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chip. News of his departure became a major tech-industry topic, and Google's share price fell 4% on Aug. 5, the day his departure became known. Born in July 1968, Dean made the decision at age 58 to start a company, Discovery Loop, founded by four former Google researchers including Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le. It is developing an automated model in which AI autonomously proposes research hypotheses, runs thousands of experiments simultaneously, and adjusts those hypotheses based on the results, automating recursive self-improvement to accelerate scientific discovery. Reports had circulated that Chen Guangyu, a prodigy scientist born in 2009 who took part in developing the Kimi K3 model at China's Moonshot AI, had joined the firm; Dean's presentation indirectly confirmed Chen's arrival. Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, with 2.8 trillion parameters, in July. The 17-year-old prodigy chose Discovery Loop over Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.