Google: The AI Company

Google faces the greatest innovator's dilemma in history. They
invented the Transformer — the breakthrough technology powering
every modern AI system from ChatGPT to Claude (and, of course,
Gemini). They employed nearly all the top AI talent: Ilya
Sutskever, Geoff Hinton, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei — more or
less everyone who leads modern AI worked at Google circa 2014.
They built the best dedicated AI infrastructure (TPUs!) and
deployed AI at massive scale years before anyone else. And yet...
the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 caught them completely
flat-footed. How on earth did the greatest business in history
wind up playing catch-up to a nonprofit-turned-startup?


Today we tell the complete story of Google's 20+ year AI journey:
from their first tiny language model in 2001 through the creation
Google Brain, the birth of the transformer, the talent exodus to
OpenAI (sparked by Elon Musk's fury over Google’s DeepMind
acquisition), and their current all-hands-on-deck response with
Gemini. And oh yeah — a little business called Waymo that went
from crazy moonshot idea to doing more rides than Lyft in San
Francisco, potentially building another Google-sized business
within Google. This is the story of how the world's greatest
business faces its greatest test: can they disrupt themselves
without losing their $140B annual profit-generating machine in
Search?


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Geoff Hinton’s 2007 Tech Talk at Google

Our recent ACQ2 episode with Tobi Lutke

Worldly Partners’ Multi-Decade Alphabet Study

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