I had the great honor and pleasure of sitting down with @JeffDean for his first public talk since leaving Google, where he spent an extraordinary 27 years. Few people have shaped modern computing and AI as profoundly - from MapReduce and Bigtable to TensorFlow, Mixture-of-Experts, TPUs, and Gemini. Our conversation covered some of the biggest questions shaping the future of AI: • How do you recognize a foundational idea before everyone else does? • How do you choose a research problem worth spending 5 years on? • What can coding teach us about building better reasoning models? • What might recursive self-improvement (RSI) actually look like? • What happens when the scientific discovery loop itself becomes increasingly automated? (and how is Jeff’s new startup going to contribute in this space?) • As AI becomes increasingly autonomous, how do we keep it safe and secure? • What should the next generation of researchers be working on? Here are some key insights and highlights for anyone building the future of AI. 🧵1/8