[4][5] He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington in 1996, working under Craig Chambers on compilers[6] and whole-program optimization techniques for object-oriented programming languages.

[11][6] Before graduate school, he worked at the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS, developing software for statistical modeling and forecasting of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

This ended with "the cat neuron paper", a deep belief network trained by unsupervised learning on YouTube videos.

In April 2018, he was appointed the head of Google's artificial intelligence division, after John Giannandrea left to lead Apple's AI projects.

[6] At various times, he has also worked on improving search quality, statistical machine translation and internal software development tools and has had significant involvement in the engineering hiring process.

Gebru challenged Google's research review process and wrote that if her concerns were not addressed, they could "work on an end date".

Evals showed a quality improvement of 5 points.Dean was interviewed for the 2018 book Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it by the American futurist Martin Ford.