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Keeping pace with AI can seem impossible, but Google veteran Jeff Dean says Gen Z doesn’t need to know everything about AI to succeed in today’s job market.

“I often tell students it’s better to skim 10 papers than to read one in detail because you then get 10 points in your cloud of what might be possible,” Dean at the 2026 Frontier & Pioneer Symposium. “Or, even skim 100 abstracts because what you want to be able to do is connect important ideas that have not yet been connected.”

Dean’s appearance at the event was his first public talk since leaving Google earlier this month. He worked at the tech giant for 27 years, serving as head of Google AI from 2018 to 2023 and Google’s chief scientist for the past three years, according to his . He is now the co-founder and CEO of AI startup , which aims to act as an autonomous researcher. 

For aspiring tech workers, Dean says the key is to manage time strategically and think across disciplines, not take shortcuts. The right challenge is neither a 20-year moonshot with no clear path, nor a two-year problem too simple to matter. 

“The perfect shape of a problem that you want to work on in a reasonably long-term manner [is] like five years or something,” Dean said. “Try lots of things that might not work. Some of them will.”

Dean is optimistic about AI’s impact

Even as prominent researchers warn that AI could replace workers and concentrate wealth among the people and companies that own the technology, Dean remains firmly optimistic about its broader social value.

Geoffrey Hinton, often called the “Godfather of AI” due to his pioneering research in the field, cautioned last year that companies may use the technology to replace employees, potentially producing large-scale job losses while sending more profits to a small group of owners. Economists also warn that companies will not necessarily share AI’s benefits evenly without deliberate choices about how to depoy the technology.

Dean sees a different, more constructive possibility. He sees AI as a tool that expands what people can accomplish. In his view, AI is not about automating routine work or cutting costs. Instead, use cases of the technology include accelerating medical research, improving access to health services, strengthening education and helping individuals tackle technical or scientific questions that would otherwise be beyond their reach. He argued that AI can make people more capable rather than simply make them easier to replace.

AI presents “incredibly positive” use cases, Dean said. “I think that’s super exciting.”