Google, every mention

Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired Oct 6, 2025 · 100 mentions

• ▶ 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
• ▶ 19:46 David Rosenthal So Google and Franz, of course, enters this, and Franz builds
• ▶ 20:17 David Rosenthal Jeff Dean hears about this and the work that Franz and the Translate team have done.
• ▶ 20:48 David Rosenthal And we've trained it on a corpus of two trillion words from the Google search index.
• ▶ 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…
• ▶ 22:12 David Rosenthal And as Jeff knows very well, because he and Sanjay basically built it with Erz Holze, Google's infrastructure is extremely parallelizable.
• ▶ 22:20 David Rosenthal Distributed, you can break up workloads into little chunks, send them all over the various data centers that Google has.
• ▶ 22:29 Ben Gilbert They are the single best company in the world at parallelizing workloads across CPUs across multiple data centers.
• ▶ 22:50 David Rosenthal And so then they ship it in Google Translate, and it's amazing.
• ▶ 23:02 David Rosenthal So this is the first large, I'm using large in quotes here, language model used in production in a product at Google.
• ▶ 23:21 David Rosenthal That might be interesting, you know, and of course, the crown jewel of Google's business that also might be interesting application for this, the ad quality score for AdWords is literally the predicted click-through rate
• ▶ 23:21 David Rosenthal That might be interesting, you know, and of course, the crown jewel of Google's business that also might be interesting application for this, the ad quality score for AdWords is literally the predicted click-through rate
• ▶ 23:38 David Rosenthal On a given set of ad copy, you can see how an LLM that is really good at ingesting information, understanding it, and predicting things based on that might be really useful for calculating ad quality for Google.
• ▶ 23:53 Ben Gilbert Yep, which is the direct translation to Google's bottom line.
• ▶ 24:05 David Rosenthal Also in 2007 begins the sort of momentous intersection of several computer science professors on the Google campus.
• ▶ 24:19 David Rosenthal So in April of 2007, Larry Page hires Sebastian Thrun from Stanford to come to Google and work first part-time and then full-time
• ▶ 24:59 Ben Gilbert Funny story about Sebastian, the way that he actually comes to Google.
• ▶ 27:16 David Rosenthal So April, 2007, Sebastian comes over from sale into Google.
• ▶ 27:22 David Rosenthal One of the first things he does over the next set of months is a project called Ground Truth for Google Maps.
• ▶ 27:29 Ben Gilbert Which is essentially Google Maps.
• ▶ 27:31 David Rosenthal It is essentially Google Maps.
• ▶ 27:32 David Rosenthal So before Ground Truth, Google Maps existed as a product, but they had to get all the mapping data from a company called Tele Atlas.
• ▶ 28:07 Ben Gilbert And Sebastian's first thing was Street View, right?
• ▶ 28:15 David Rosenthal So then, coming into Google, Ground Truth is this sort of moonshot type project to recreate all the TeleAtlas data.
• ▶ 28:27 Ben Gilbert Of streets from Street View, and they incorporated some other data.
• ▶ 28:40 David Rosenthal And just like all of the AI and AI enabled projects within Google that we're talking about here works very, very well, very quickly.
• ▶ 29:08 David Rosenthal We should bring in AI professors, academics, I know all these people, into Google part-time.
• ▶ 29:28 David Rosenthal They'll get Google stock, and they get to stay professors at their academic institutions.
• ▶ 29:53 David Rosenthal Hinton to the Google campus to come and give a tech talk.
• ▶ 29:57 David Rosenthal Not yet hiring him, but come give a tech talk to, you know, all the folks at Google and talk about some of the new work, Jeff, that you and your PhD and postdoc students there at the University of Toronto are doing on blazing new paths…
• ▶ 32:58 David Rosenthal So Jeff comes and he gives this talk at Google.
• ▶ 33:05 David Rosenthal This is an artifact of history sitting there on YouTube and people at Google, Sebastian, Jeff Dean, all the other folks who are talking about, they get
• ▶ 33:16 David Rosenthal Because they've already been doing stuff like this with Translate and the language models that they're working with.
• ▶ 33:43 David Rosenthal So Sebastian Thrun brings Jeff Hinton into the Google fold after this tech talk, I think first as a consultant over the next couple years, and then this is amazing.
• ▶ 33:54 David Rosenthal Later, Jeff Hinton technically becomes an intern at Google.
• ▶ 34:11 David Rosenthal So in the next couple years after 2007 here, Sebastian's concept of bringing these computer science machine learning academics into Google as contractors or part-time interns, basically letting them keep their academic posts and work on…
• ▶ 34:39 David Rosenthal Within Google.
• ▶ 34:40 David Rosenthal And it becomes Google X.
• ▶ 34:45 David Rosenthal The first project within Google X.
• ▶ 35:07 David Rosenthal It's called Google Brain.
• ▶ 35:10 David Rosenthal But before we tell the Google Brain story, now is a great time to thank our friends at JPMorgan Payments.
• ▶ 36:11 David Rosenthal Whether your treasury is in the millions or billions, or perhaps like the company we're talking about this episode, in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
• ▶ 37:28 Ben Gilbert So Google Brain.
• ▶ 37:29 David Rosenthal So when Sebastian left Stanford full-time and joined Google full-time, of course somebody else had to take over SAIL.
• ▶ 37:50 David Rosenthal He recruits Andrew to come part-time, start spending a day a week on the Google campus.
• ▶ 38:02 David Rosenthal So one day, in the twenty-ten, twenty-eleven time frame, Andrew's spending his day a week on the Google campus, and he bumps into, who else?
• ▶ 38:26 David Rosenthal The time might finally be right to try and take a real big swing on this within Google and build a massive, really large, deep learning model in the vein of what Jeff Hinton has been talking about on highly paralyzable Google…
• ▶ 38:45 Ben Gilbert And when you say the time might be right, Google had tried twice before, and neither project really worked.
• ▶ 39:01 Ben Gilbert So there's a little bit of scar tissue in the sort of research group at Google of, are large-scale neural networks actually going to work for us on Google infrastructure?
• ▶ 39:10 David Rosenthal So, the two of them, Andrew Ng and Jeff Dean, pull in Greg Corrado, who is a neuroscience PhD and amazing researcher who was already working at Google.
• ▶ 39:20 David Rosenthal And in 2011, the three of them launch the second official project within X, appropriately enough, called Google Brain.
• ▶ 39:41 Ben Gilbert You know, Google is all about taking this sort of frontier research and then doing the architectural and engineering system to make it actually run.
• ▶ 40:10 David Rosenthal Most people in the field thought this was not gonna work, and most people in Google thought this was not gonna work.
• ▶ 41:49 Ben Gilbert You talk to anyone at Google, you talk to anyone in AI, they're like,
• ▶ 42:22 Ben Gilbert In Google story.
• ▶ 42:29 David Rosenthal You talk to people at Google, they're like that TGIF.
• ▶ 42:42 Ben Gilbert And not only that, it could run on a distributed system that Google built to actually make it work on their infrastructure.
• ▶ 42:53 Ben Gilbert Google's got this big infrastructure asset.
• ▶ 43:12 David Rosenthal I think it's not that much of a leap to say that the cat paper led to probably hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue generated by Google and Facebook and ByteDance over the next decade.
• ▶ 52:29 David Rosenthal And, predictably, as you might imagine, it gets acquired by Google almost immediately.
• ▶ 53:34 Ben Gilbert That includes Google.
• ▶ 55:33 Ben Gilbert So it's Baidu and Google really going at the end.
• ▶ 55:41 Ben Gilbert We want to land at Google.
• ▶ 55:42 Ben Gilbert And so they stop the bidding at forty-four million dollars and just say, Google,
• ▶ 55:54 David Rosenthal It's almost like Google itself and, you know, the Dutch auction IPO process.
• ▶ 56:17 David Rosenthal Well, that leads to the three of them joining Google Brain directly and turbocharging everything going on there.
• ▶ 56:25 David Rosenthal Spoiler alert, a couple years later, Astro Teller, who would take over running Google X after Sebastian Thrun left, he would get quoted in the New York Times in a profile of Google X that the gains to Google's core businesses in search and…
• ▶ 56:25 David Rosenthal Spoiler alert, a couple years later, Astro Teller, who would take over running Google X after Sebastian Thrun left, he would get quoted in the New York Times in a profile of Google X that the gains to Google's core businesses in search and…
• ▶ 56:25 David Rosenthal Spoiler alert, a couple years later, Astro Teller, who would take over running Google X after Sebastian Thrun left, he would get quoted in the New York Times in a profile of Google X that the gains to Google's core businesses in search and…
• ▶ 56:45 David Rosenthal Have way more than funded all of the other bets that they have made within Google X and throughout the company over the years.
• ▶ 56:45 David Rosenthal Have way more than funded all of the other bets that they have made within Google X and throughout the company over the years.
• ▶ 57:06 David Rosenthal That's not where the AI history ends within Google.
• ▶ 57:10 David Rosenthal There is another very important piece of the Google AI story that is an acquisition from outside of Google, the AI equivalent of Google's acquisition of YouTube.
• ▶ 1:00:01 David Rosenthal The YouTube of AI for Google.
• ▶ 1:00:03 Ben Gilbert They bought this thing for, we'll talk about the purchase price, but it's worth, what, five hundred billion dollars today?
• ▶ 1:00:41 David Rosenthal That Google is spending a lot of money to buy something in London that I've never heard of.
• ▶ 1:01:36 David Rosenthal It turns out, though, not only was that description of what DeepMind was fairly accurate, this company and this purchase of it by Google was the butterfly flapping its wings equivalent moment that directly leads to OpenAI, ChatGPT,…
• ▶ 1:06:00 David Rosenthal I think probably some people, probably, almost certainly at Google, were thinking, oh, we can create narrow intelligence that'll be better than humans at certain tasks.
• ▶ 1:06:57 David Rosenthal They want to build really, really, really, really, really big deep learning neural networks that requires Google size levels of compute.
• ▶ 1:08:05 David Rosenthal The Summit, the Singularity Summit, organized by Ray Kurzweil, a future Google employee, I think, chief futurist, noted futurist, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Peter Thiel.
• ▶ 1:14:52 David Rosenthal So Elon's excitement channeled initially through DeepMind and Demis about AI and AI for Tesla starts ratcheting up big time.
• ▶ 1:15:03 David Rosenthal Meanwhile, back in London, DeepMind is getting to work.
• ▶ 1:15:35 David Rosenthal He wants to buy the company.
• ▶ 1:15:38 David Rosenthal Mark has woken up to everything that's going on at Google after AlexNet and what AI is doing for social media feed recommendations at YouTube.
• ▶ 1:16:10 David Rosenthal And so with Jan, they have created FAIR, Facebook AI research, which is a Google brain rival within Facebook.
• ▶ 1:16:24 David Rosenthal And is also the lead investor in DeepMind.
• ▶ 1:16:27 David Rosenthal Where do you think Mark learned about DeepMind?
• ▶ 1:16:41 David Rosenthal So, Mark calls and offers to buy the company.
• ▶ 1:16:57 Ben Gilbert That squares with what Cade Metz has in his book that the founders would have made about twice as much money from taking Facebook's offer versus taking Google's offer.
• ▶ 1:17:11 Ben Gilbert Which, by the way, is kind of against everything the company was founded on.
• ▶ 1:17:16 Ben Gilbert The whole aim of the company and what he's promised the team is that DeepMind is going to stay independent, do research, publish in the scientific community.
• ▶ 1:17:51 Ben Gilbert Turns out Mark is not flexible on letting Demis keep control of DeepMind.
• ▶ 1:17:58 Ben Gilbert Demis sort of argued for, we need to stay separate and carved out, and we need this independent oversight board with his ability to intervene if the mission of DeepMind is no longer being followed.
• ▶ 1:18:15 David Rosenthal So, as this negotiation is going on, of course, the investors in DeepMind get wind of this.
• ▶ 1:18:26 David Rosenthal He immediately calls up Demis and says, I will buy the company right now with Tesla stock.
• ▶ 1:19:17 Ben Gilbert Do you want my story of how Larry knows about the company?
• ▶ 1:19:20 David Rosenthal I absolutely want your story of how Larry knows about the company.
• ▶ 1:19:23 Ben Gilbert So this is still early in DeepMind's life.
• ▶ 1:19:28 Ben Gilbert Apparently, Elon Musk is on a private jet with Luke Nosek, who's another member of the PayPal mafia and an angel investor in DeepMind.