Google Translate, every mention

Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired Oct 6, 2025 · 16 mentions

• ▶ 18:26 David Rosenthal Google had just recently launched the Google Translate product.
• ▶ 19:05 David Rosenthal And so one of those products was Google Translate, you know, not the same level of user base or perhaps impact on the world as Gmail or Maps or whatnot, but still a magical, magical product.
• ▶ 19:17 David Rosenthal And the chief architect for Google Translate was another
• ▶ 20:17 David Rosenthal Jeff Dean hears about this and the work that Franz and the Translate team have done.
• ▶ 21:34 David Rosenthal Jeff goes and parachutes in and works with the translate team for a few months, and he re-architects the algorithm to run on the words and the sentences in parallel instead of sequentially, because when you're translating a set of…
• ▶ 22:50 David Rosenthal And so then they ship it in Google Translate, and it's amazing.
• ▶ 33:16 David Rosenthal Because they've already been doing stuff like this with Translate and the language models that they're working with.
• ▶ 1:52:23 David Rosenthal So coming out of the success of Franz Ox's work on Google Translate and the improvements that happened there.
• ▶ 1:52:35 David Rosenthal They keep iterating on Translate, and then once Jeff Hitton comes on board and AlexNet happens, they switch over to a neural network-based language model for Translate.
• ▶ 1:53:32 David Rosenthal So, they do the rewrite of Google Translate, make it based on recurrent neural networks, which were state-of-the-art at that point in time, and it's a big improvement.
• ▶ 1:53:41 David Rosenthal But, as teams within Google Brain and Google Translate keep working on it,
• ▶ 1:54:58 David Rosenthal And indeed, in 2016, they incorporated into Google Translate these LSTMs.
• ▶ 1:58:16 David Rosenthal Gnome joins the team, basically pulls a Jeff Dean, rewrites the entire code base from scratch, and when he's done, the transformer now crushes the LSTM-based Google Translate solution.
• ▶ 2:01:27 Ben Gilbert This is more than better translate.
• ▶ 2:01:30 David Rosenthal Yeah, this is gonna be more than better Google translate.
• ▶ 2:20:48 David Rosenthal After the Transformer paper comes out, he and the rest of the team are like, guys, we can use this for a lot more than Google Translate.