@JeffDean: The video from the commencement speech I gave a couple of weeks ago at @uwcse is now up. Congratulations again to all t…

The video from the commencement speech I gave a couple of weeks ago at @uwcse is now up. Congratulations again to all the graduates, and thanks for having me, @MBalazinska! https://youtu.be/Pvkmwh7Mito?si=cFWmlHCXroBAa7wB&t=198… (video is of whole ceremony: my part starts around the 3 minute mark)

TL;DR

Jeff Dean shares three pieces of life advice at the University of Washington Allen School graduation ceremony: embrace every experience, be patient and persistent, and care deeply about the people around you. He also recounts his journey from childhood to Google Chief Scientist, and his thoughts on the potential and responsibility of AI.

Opening and Dean’s Address

Dean Magdalena Balazinska first welcomed the families and friends of the Class of 2026, thanked the faculty and staff for their support, and invited the graduates to applaud everyone who helped them. She then introduced the commencement speaker—an outstanding alumnus who graduated from the University of Washington in 1996, Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean.

At Google, Jeff Dean co‑designed systems such as MapReduce, Bigtable, Spanner, and TensorFlow. His code powers Google’s search, advertising, YouTube, and other products. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an ACM Fellow, and has received the IEEE John von Neumann Medal and the ACM Prize in Computing.

Jeff Dean’s Speech: Three Pieces of Advice

Embrace Every Experience

Jeff Dean spent his childhood all over the world. His father researched tropical diseases and later moved into public health epidemiology; his mother was a medical anthropologist. In 12 years he attended 11 schools, living in Hawaii, Boston, Uganda, Arkansas, Minnesota, Somalia, and Atlanta. That experience taught him that “extraordinary people and communities exist everywhere; each place has its own beauty,” and it made him comfortable with being uncomfortable, while realizing he could find belonging anywhere.

First advice: Embrace every experience. Even when you find yourself somewhere unexpected, if you are willing to look, you can find value and learn something new.

Be Patient and Persistent

He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota. In his senior year he took a parallel computing course and became fascinated with neural networks. At the time, neural networks could only solve toy problems and could not scale to the truly important real‑world problems. He naively thought that training a neural network on the department’s 32‑processor machine would lead to a breakthrough, but it actually required about a million times more computing power. He filed away that experience, thinking it might be useful when computers became more powerful.

About 20 years later, thanks to Moore’s law and improvements in computing performance, around 2012 computers were about a million times more powerful than in the 1990s. Together with specialized hardware, the deep learning and AI revolution finally began. He said: “From the research idea I explored as a senior undergraduate to the technology catching up, it took more than 20 years. But I kept moving forward. When the time is right, something you learned long ago may help you achieve what was previously impossible.”

Second advice: Be patient and persistent.

Care Deeply About the People Around You

After his undergraduate degree, he took a year off to work at the World Health Organization, forecasting the AIDS pandemic. Later he and his wife Heidi applied to graduate school. The cover of the University of Washington brochure featured Drumheller Fountain and Mount Rainier, and the two were drawn there—even though it took him eight months to see Mount Rainier clearly for the first time.

The computer science department was then squeezed into Sieg Hall, with poor conditions and even temporary trailers. He was lucky to have an office in one of the trailers, which they called “the manor.” In the acknowledgments of his PhD thesis, he wrote that his trailer office mates were “the best group of friends one could imagine.” “My graduation was delayed by several months because of constant chatting—mostly about trivial things—and a dart‑throwing period, but it was entirely worth it.”

His PhD advisor, Craig Chambers, not only taught him compiler knowledge and research methods, but also, by having Monday coffee at the Hub café with a quadruple espresso special, led him from hot chocolate to lattes, cappuccinos, and macchiatos. Coffee became a social bond in his work—he and a group of colleagues brewed coffee together every morning for more than twenty years, making over 20,000 cappuccinos.

Third advice: Care deeply about the people around you and the things you invest your energy in. Take time to reflect and stay connected. The memories you create with your classmates will shape your future.

From Graduate Student to Google

With his wife Heidi and soon‑to‑be‑born daughter Victoria by his side, he completed his PhD. After graduating, he moved to Silicon Valley and joined a fledgling Google (about 20 people, above a T‑Mobile store in Palo Alto) in 1999. He believed in Google’s mission—“to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—and believed that a small team could build things that would change the world.

The Potential and Responsibility of AI

When Google observed that a neuron in an artificial neural network had learned to “discover what a cat is” (without ever being told what a cat was, by learning from unlabeled YouTube video frames—and there were plenty of cats on YouTube), they realized that large‑scale neural networks would fundamentally change what computers could do.

Today, AI is making possible:

• Bringing expert ophthalmology research to rural India to help detect early signs of disease.
• AlphaFold helping scientists around the world understand millions of protein structures.
• In Somalia (where Jeff lived as a child), a machine‑learning prediction system works with aid organizations to provide daily flood forecasts, protecting medical centers from flooding.

Jeff emphasized: “With great technological progress comes great responsibility. We must intentionally design safety measures and ethical boundaries so that technology and AI serve the broader public good, not just the few.”

Expectations for the Graduates

In a rapidly changing world, tools simplify how we do things in some situations, but what matters more is “becoming wiser about what you create with these technologies.” This ability to discern what is important can become a superpower.

A paper he co‑authored proposed 18 milestones with positive impact, including:

• Systems that improve global healthcare
• Educational tutoring systems that give everyone a personal mentor
• Systems that identify misinformation and help distinguish truth from fiction
• Tools that accelerate scientific discovery and engineering
• Systems that enhance a sense of community

Most importantly: Find what excites you. Use your curiosity, creativity, and problem‑solving skills to build a better future.

Closing

Jeff Dean concluded his speech with warm congratulations to the graduates, and the audience erupted in applause.

Source: @JeffDean: The video from the commencement speech I gave a couple of weeks ago at @uwcse is now up. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvkmwh7Mito)

Jeff Dean (@JeffDean): I enjoyed giving the commencement address at the University of Washington Allen School @uwcse graduation this evening. So many happy students and their families and friends!

Congratulations to all the graduates of the class of 2026! 🎓

Thanks for inviting me, @MBalazinska!