Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) said on Tuesday it held a special lecture at the Seoul AI Hub on Aug. 13 with Jeff Dean (제프 딘) of Discovery Loop, co-founder and chief executive officer. The event was co-hosted with a national AI research hub.

Dean joined Google as an early member. He led development of MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and TPUs, and co-founded Google Brain. More recently, he co-founded Discovery Loop, a startup that automates science and engineering research processes using AI.

The lecture was arranged during his visit to South Korea for a KDD 2026 keynote speech. Under the theme "Major trends in machine learning," Dean introduced AI’s development over the past 15 years and future research directions. He explained that more computing, more data and larger models have driven improvements in AI performance. "When humans and AI work together, they can reach better results than either can alone," he said.

In the question-and-answer session, students and researchers asked about job changes from the spread of coding agents, ways to ensure the safety of autonomous experimentation systems and equity in AI capabilities. After the lecture, Dean met professors and master's and doctoral researchers at KAIST's Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI to discuss research topics including large-scale distributed learning and AI infrastructure.

KAIST President Chung-sik Bae (배충식) said, "The great AI transition is fundamentally changing the way research itself is done in science and engineering." He added, "We will contribute to strengthening South Korea's competitiveness in AI research by expanding research collaboration with the world's top researchers."