KAIST

KAIST (President Chungsik Bae) announced on August 18 that the National AI Research Lab (NAIRL), together with the KAIST Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI, hosted a special lecture by Jeff Dean, Co-Founder and CEO of Discovery Loop, at Seoul AI Hub on August 13.

Dean joined Google in 1999 as one of its earliest employees. Over 27 years, he led the development of MapReduce and Bigtable — the backbone of Google's search infrastructure — as well as TensorFlow and TPUs, which became foundational to the AI era. He co-founded Google Brain and, as Chief Scientist, oversaw the development of Gemini, earning him a reputation as "the legend of Google."

He recently founded Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals. The company aims to automate the full experimental loop of research — from forming a hypothesis to running experiments and analyzing results — in order to accelerate the pace of scientific and engineering discovery itself.

The lecture was arranged around Dean’s visit to Korea for his keynote address at KDD 2026, the leading international conferences in data mining. Titled “Exciting Trends in Machine Learning,” it was his first public talk since announcing the founding of Discovery Loop.

KAIST arranged the event not only to share the research experience and future vision of a world-renowned AI scholar with researchers in Korea, but also as an occasion for substantive research exchange.

Dean traced the past 15 years of AI through the research he was directly involved in. As an undergraduate in the 1990s, he worked on training neural networks across multiple computers, but the computing power of the time was not enough to make it work. Two decades later, once sufficient compute became available, the same idea finally began to deliver. More computation, more data, and larger models leading to better performance, he explained, has been the consistent through-line of the past 15 years.

He also emphasized the role of hardware. When speech recognition accuracy improved sharply, the team calculated that if users actually began relying on the feature, Google would have needed to double the size of its data centers using existing approaches. That realization led to the development of the TPU, a chip purpose-built for AI computation. Dean noted that the accumulated progress in both hardware and algorithms is what has brought today's AI models to gold-medal-level performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).

"When humans and AI work together, we can reach better outcomes than either could alone," said Dean.

“Advances in AI are rapidly reshaping the way scientific and engineering research is conducted, making close collaboration with the world’s leading researchers more important than ever,” said KAIST President Chungsik Bae. “KAIST aims to foster a research ecosystem where top AI researchers from around the world can exchange ideas and tackle ambitious challenges alongside their Korean counterparts, positioning Korea at the forefront of global AI research.”

The lecture drew about 150 on-site attendees, including faculty and students from KAIST, Korea University, Yonsei University, and POSTECH, the universities of the NAIRL consortium, and partner company representatives, with another 220 joining via live stream. In the Q&A that followed, students and researchers raised questions on how the spread of coding agents will reshape jobs, how safety can be ensured in autonomous experimental systems, and how equitable access to AI capabilities can be maintained.

After the lecture, Dean joined a small-group research discussion with faculty members and graduate researchers from the KAIST Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI, offering direct feedback on each lab's work in areas such as large-scale distributed training and AI infrastructure.

"This was an opportunity for researchers in Korea to hear directly from a legendary scholar who has been at the very front of AI infrastructure and model development for the past 15 years," said Kee-Eung Kim, Director of NAIRL. "We will continue to expand exchanges with the world's leading researchers and connect Korea's AI research ecosystem to the global community."

Discovery Loop, founded in 2026, is an AI startup building systems that run thousands of experiments in parallel using frontier AI models and large-scale computing infrastructure. Starting with the automation of machine learning research and development, the company plans to expand into challenges such as drug discovery and clean energy.

The National AI Research Lab (NAIRL), hosted by KAIST, was established in October 2024 with support from the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP). It is Korea's largest industry-academia-research collaboration platform for AI, bringing together four universities (KAIST, Korea University, POSTECH, and Yonsei University) alongside domestic and international companies and research institutions, and expanding its global AI research network through partnerships with leading institutions abroad.

The KAIST Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI, established in 2019, was the first in Korea to offer master's and doctoral degrees dedicated to artificial intelligence. Its faculty includes researchers formerly with Google Brain, IBM Watson Research Center, Microsoft Research, and NVIDIA Research.