Sanjay Ghemawat, the Kota kid who spent decades at Google building large-scale computing, is now leaving to make an AI that can run thousands of experiments

Sanjay Ghemawat, one of the key scientists behind Google's core computing infrastructure, has left the company after more than two decades to launch an artificial intelligence startup with longtime collaborator Jeff Dean and other former Google researchers. Ghemawat, who grew up in Kota, Rajasthan, helped develop technologies including Google File System, MapReduce and Bigtable, which support several Google products and services.

While Ghemawat is not as widely known as Google CEO Sundar Pichai or founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, his work has played a major role in the company's technology infrastructure.

Google's ability to process huge amounts of information and deliver services at scale has been supported by systems developed by engineers and scientists such as Ghemawat and Dean.

Sanjay Ghemawat: A teenager from Kota

Sanjay Ghemawat was born in West Lafayette, Indiana, to Indian parents while his father was pursuing a PhD at Purdue University. His family later returned to India after his father took up a teaching position at the University of Kota.

Ghemawat spent much of his childhood in Kota, Rajasthan. The city is now known for its education institutes and coaching centres. Some sources indicate that he studied at St Paul’s School on Mala Road in Kota. He completed his school education in 1982 before moving to the United States for higher studies.

Ghemawat earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Cornell University and later completed a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Before joining Google in 1999, he worked at DEC Systems Research Center. It was there that he met computer scientist Jeff Dean. Their professional association later developed into a long-term collaboration that continued at Google and is now moving to a new AI venture.

On Wednesday night, Dean posted on X, giving a shoutout to his friend. “Oh look! My longtime friend and colleague @Sanjay_Ghemawat is now on Twitter! Give him a follow!”

Ghemawat and Dean had worked on projects such as a Java compiler and a system profiling tool before joining Google. At Google, they went on to develop systems that became important to modern computing.

Nearly three decades after they first began working together, the two are now starting another chapter as co-founders of AI startup Discovery Loop.

Sanjay Ghemawat’s journey in Google

Ghemawat joined Google in late 1999, when the company was still primarily known as a search engine. He later became one of the scientists involved in developing the technical systems that supported Google's expansion.

Alongside Jeff Dean, Ghemawat helped develop the Google File System (GFS). The system allowed Google to store and manage large amounts of data across thousands of computers.

The two also developed MapReduce, which enabled large datasets to be processed more efficiently. The technology later influenced open-source projects such as Apache Hadoop.

Sanjay worked on Google's backend infrastructure

Ghemawat also contributed to Bigtable, Google's system for storing large amounts of information, and Spanner, a database designed to keep data synchronised across servers around the world.

His work later extended to technologies including Protocol Buffers, TensorFlow and Pathways. He also contributed to Google's AI research, including the PaLM language model.

These systems helped Google expand its technology beyond search and into areas such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

Ghemawat's contributions have also received recognition from the technology and academic communities. He was elected to the American National Academy of Engineering in 2009 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.

Ghemawat and Dean jointly received the ACM Prize in Computing for their work on internet infrastructure. They also received the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award.

Why is Sanjay Ghemawat leaving Google?

Ghemawat is now moving into the AI startup space with Jeff Dean. They are joined by former Google DeepMind vice-president Oriol Vinyals and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le to launch Discovery Loop.

The new company is organised as a public benefit corporation, with Alphabet backing it as a founding investor and cloud computing partner.

Discovery Loop aims to use artificial intelligence to automate experimental workflows in science and engineering. According to WIRED, the founders want to develop AI systems that can propose, conduct and evaluate thousands of experiments simultaneously.

The idea is to use AI to speed up scientific and engineering research by reducing the amount of manual work involved in experimental processes. Speaking to The New York Times, Dean said the goal is to "more fully automate what has traditionally been a very human-intensive experimental loop," enabling both a greater number and higher quality of experiments.

Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le have left Google to launch a new AI startup called Discovery Loop.

Reports note that Google CEO Sundar Pichai tried very hard to keep Ghemawat, Dean and others within the company but they had made up their mind.

The move marks a new phase for Ghemawat and Dean, who have spent decades building systems that helped Google handle large-scale computing and data processing. Their new company will focus on applying AI to scientific and engineering research rather than Google's traditional internet and cloud products.