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

• ▶ 1:19:36 Ben Gilbert And they're reading an email from Demis with an update about a breakthrough that they had where DeepMind AI figured out a clever way to win at the Atari game breakout.
• ▶ 1:20:31 Ben Gilbert And the crazy thing is, this kinship between Larry and Demis is, I think, the reason why the deal gets done at Google.
• ▶ 1:20:43 David Rosenthal Larry has always viewed Google as an AI company.
• ▶ 1:20:48 David Rosenthal Demis, of course, views DeepMind so much as an AI company that he doesn't even want to make any products until they can get to AGI.
• ▶ 1:21:02 Ben Gilbert Larry was completely on board with the mission of everything that DeepMind was doing.
• ▶ 1:21:06 David Rosenthal And there's something else very convenient about Google.
• ▶ 1:21:12 David Rosenthal They already have Brain.
• ▶ 1:21:14 David Rosenthal So Larry doesn't need Demis and Shane and Mustafa and DeepMind to come work on products within Google.
• ▶ 1:21:14 David Rosenthal So Larry doesn't need Demis and Shane and Mustafa and DeepMind to come work on products within Google.
• ▶ 1:21:22 David Rosenthal Brain is already working on products within Google.
• ▶ 1:21:22 David Rosenthal Brain is already working on products within Google.
• ▶ 1:21:31 David Rosenthal I don't need you to come work on products within Google.
• ▶ 1:21:34 Ben Gilbert Brain is like actively going and engaging with the product groups, trying to figure out, hey, how can we deploy neural nets into your product to make it better?
• ▶ 1:21:46 David Rosenthal Brain and neural nets are getting integrated into search, into ads, into Gmail, into everything.
• ▶ 1:21:46 David Rosenthal Brain and neural nets are getting integrated into search, into ads, into Gmail, into everything.
• ▶ 1:21:46 David Rosenthal Brain and neural nets are getting integrated into search, into ads, into Gmail, into everything.
• ▶ 1:21:52 David Rosenthal It is the perfect home for DeepMind.
• ▶ 1:21:59 David Rosenthal And, and there's a third reason why Google's the perfect fit for DeepMind.
• ▶ 1:21:59 David Rosenthal And, and there's a third reason why Google's the perfect fit for DeepMind.
• ▶ 1:22:04 David Rosenthal Google has all the compute infrastructure you could ever want right there on tap.
• ▶ 1:22:19 Ben Gilbert Was Google's head of engineering at the time.
• ▶ 1:22:52 Ben Gilbert He decides, I'm gonna get on a plane in December before the holidays and go meet DeepMind.
• ▶ 1:22:56 Ben Gilbert Crazy story about this, Jeff Hinton, who's at Google at the time, had a thing with his back where he couldn't sit down.
• ▶ 1:23:33 David Rosenthal I was thinking the first part of this, I'm pretty sure Google has planes.
• ▶ 1:23:36 David Rosenthal They could just get in a Google plane.
• ▶ 1:24:21 Ben Gilbert There's an independent oversight board that is set up to make sure that the mission and goals of DeepMind are actually being followed, and this is an asset that Google owns today that, again, I think is worth half a trillion dollars if…
• ▶ 1:24:21 Ben Gilbert There's an independent oversight board that is set up to make sure that the mission and goals of DeepMind are actually being followed, and this is an asset that Google owns today that, again, I think is worth half a trillion dollars if…
• ▶ 1:24:54 Ben Gilbert Famously, the data center cooling thing happens where DeepMind carved off some part of the team to go and be an emissary to Google and look for ways to use DeepMind.
• ▶ 1:25:09 Ben Gilbert Very quickly, July of 20 16, Google announces a 40% reduction in the energy required to cool data centers.
• ▶ 1:25:16 Ben Gilbert I mean, Google's got a lot of data centers.
• ▶ 1:25:25 Ben Gilbert And, I mean, it was just the most obvious application of neural networks inside of Google right away.
• ▶ 1:25:41 Ben Gilbert I watched the whole documentary that Google produced about it.
• ▶ 1:25:53 Ben Gilbert It's the story of how DeepMind, post-acquisition from Google, trained a model to beat the world Go champion at Go.
• ▶ 1:30:46 Ben Gilbert So, what are the second order effects of Google buying DeepMind?
• ▶ 1:30:46 Ben Gilbert So, what are the second order effects of Google buying DeepMind?
• ▶ 1:31:09 David Rosenthal When Google buys DeepMind out from under him, Elon goes ballistic.
• ▶ 1:31:09 David Rosenthal When Google buys DeepMind out from under him, Elon goes ballistic.
• ▶ 1:31:14 David Rosenthal As we said, Elon and Larry had always been very close, and now here's Google, who Elon has already started to sour on a little bit as he's now trying to hire AI researchers, and you've got Alan Eustace flying around the world sucking up…
• ▶ 1:31:33 David Rosenthal And Elon's invested in DeepMind
• ▶ 1:31:36 David Rosenthal Wanted to bring DeepMind into his own AI team at Tesla and gone out from under him.
• ▶ 1:32:22 David Rosenthal To all of the AI researchers that Google, and to a certain extent Facebook, have sucked up and basically created this duopoly status on.
• ▶ 1:32:33 Ben Gilbert Again, Google's business model and Facebook's business model, these feed recommenders, or these classifiers, turn out to be unbelievably valuable so they can, it's funny in hindsight saying this, pay tons of money to these people.
• ▶ 1:33:01 David Rosenthal And the question and the pitch that Ilan and Sam have for these researchers gathered at this dinner is, what would it take to get you out of Google for you to leave?
• ▶ 1:33:31 David Rosenthal And we get to hang out here at Google.
• ▶ 1:33:49 David Rosenthal There is nothing you could tell us that would cause us to leave Google.
• ▶ 1:34:07 David Rosenthal Quote is, the trouble was, so many of the people most qualified to solve these problems were already working for Google.
• ▶ 1:34:39 David Rosenthal Of course, of AlexNet, and DNN Research, and Google, and about to become founding chief scientist of OpenAI.
• ▶ 1:35:02 Ben Gilbert Free of the forces of Facebook and Google and independent of their control.
• ▶ 1:35:16 David Rosenthal All of these incredible advances, this intelligence that we believe is to come, will be for the good of everyone, not just for Google and Facebook.
• ▶ 1:35:31 Ben Gilbert It's sort of an activation energy problem where once Ilya said, okay, I'm in, and once he said, I'm in, by the way, Google came back with a big counter, something like double the offer, and I think it was delivered from Jeff Dean…
• ▶ 1:35:51 David Rosenthal And it was nowhere near all of the top researchers who left Google to do this, but it was enough.
• ▶ 1:35:56 David Rosenthal It was a group of seven or so researchers who left Google and joined Elon and Sam and Greg Brockman from Stripe who came over to create open AI.
• ▶ 1:37:23 David Rosenthal Not as much as they could make at Google and Facebook, but still a million or two million dollars for these folks.
• ▶ 1:37:36 David Rosenthal Well, in the first days, it was all hands on deck recruiting and hiring researchers, and there was the initial crew that came over, and then pretty quickly after that in early 2016, they get a big, big win when Dario Amadei leaves Google,…
• ▶ 1:38:01 Ben Gilbert And was he on Google Brain before this?
• ▶ 1:38:03 David Rosenthal He was on Google Brain, yep.
• ▶ 1:38:13 David Rosenthal But we're still a couple years away from Anthropic, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, everything today.
• ▶ 1:38:26 David Rosenthal Basically, the plan at OpenAI is, let's look at what's happening at DeepMind and show the research community that we can do, as a new lab, do the same incredible things that they're doing, and maybe even do them better.
• ▶ 1:38:54 David Rosenthal DeepMind, you're playing StarCraft.
• ▶ 1:39:40 David Rosenthal It was what DeepMind was doing.
• ▶ 1:39:44 David Rosenthal It was like DeepMind.
• ▶ 1:39:46 David Rosenthal And if you think back to Elon being an investor in DeepMind, being really upset about Google acquiring it out from under him.
• ▶ 1:39:46 David Rosenthal And if you think back to Elon being an investor in DeepMind, being really upset about Google acquiring it out from under him.
• ▶ 1:40:09 Ben Gilbert Okay, so that's what's going on over at OpenAI, doing a lot of DeepMind-like stuff.
• ▶ 1:40:23 Ben Gilbert Let's go back to Google, because last we sort of checked in on them.
• ▶ 1:40:26 Ben Gilbert Yeah, they bought DeepMind, but they had their talent rated, and I don't want you to get the wrong impression about where Google is sitting just because some people left to go to OpenAI.
• ▶ 1:40:36 Ben Gilbert When Alex Krzyzewski arrives at Google with Jeff Hinton and Ilya Sitskiver, he was shocked to discover that all their existing machine learning models were running on CPUs.
• ▶ 1:40:46 Ben Gilbert People had asked in the past for GPUs, since machine learning workloads were well suited to run in parallel, but Google's infrastructure team had pushed back and said, the added complexity in expanding and diversifying the fleet, let's…
• ▶ 1:41:02 Ben Gilbert And so to quote from Genius Makers, in his first days at the company, he went out and bought a GPU machine, this is Alex, from a local electronics store, stuck it in the closet down the hall from his desk, plugged it into the network, and…
• ▶ 1:41:17 Ben Gilbert Just like he did in academia, except this time Google's paying for the electricity.
• ▶ 1:41:49 Ben Gilbert Yes, he went on to be Apple's head of AI, who at this point in time was at Google and oversaw Google Brain 20 14.
• ▶ 1:41:49 Ben Gilbert Yes, he went on to be Apple's head of AI, who at this point in time was at Google and oversaw Google Brain 20 14.
• ▶ 1:41:58 Ben Gilbert For how to actually formally put GPUs into the fleet of Google's data centers, which is a big deal.
• ▶ 1:42:24 Ben Gilbert That's a big enough price tag that the request gets elevated to Larry Page, who personally approves it, even though finance wanted to kill it, because he goes, look, the future of Google is deep learning.
• ▶ 1:42:55 Ben Gilbert It's almost like Google gave NVIDIA a secret that, hey, not only does this work in research like the ImageNet competition, but neural networks are valuable enough to us as a business to make a hundred plus million dollar investment in…
• ▶ 1:43:25 Ben Gilbert So all of Google wakes up to this idea.
• ▶ 1:43:30 Ben Gilbert Google Photos happened.
• ▶ 1:43:34 Ben Gilbert David, as you pointed out earlier, Google's giant AdWords business started finding more ways to make more money with deep learning.
• ▶ 1:43:34 Ben Gilbert David, as you pointed out earlier, Google's giant AdWords business started finding more ways to make more money with deep learning.
• ▶ 1:43:41 Ben Gilbert In particular, when they integrated it, they could start predicting what ads people would click in the future, and so Google started spending hundreds of millions more on GPUs on top of that hundred and thirty million, but very quickly…
• ▶ 1:44:00 Ben Gilbert But once neural nets started to work, anyone using them, especially at Google scale, kind of had this problem.
• ▶ 1:44:36 Ben Gilbert So there's this amazing moment right after Google rolls out speech recognition, their latest use case for neural nets, just on Nexus phones, because again, they don't have the infrastructure to support it on all Android phones.
• ▶ 1:44:53 Ben Gilbert And figures out if people use this for, I don't know, call it three minutes a day, and we roll it out to all billion Android phones, we're gonna need twice the number of data centers that we currently have across all of Google just to…
• ▶ 1:45:09 Ben Gilbert There's a great quote where Jeff goes to Erz Holtzel and goes, we need another Google.
• ▶ 1:45:38 Ben Gilbert So conveniently, Jonathan Ross, who's an engineer at Google, has been spending his 20% time at this point in history working on an effort involving FPGAs.
• ▶ 1:46:23 Ben Gilbert But it would enable Google to scale their data centers without having to double their entire footprint.
• ▶ 1:47:28 Ben Gilbert It's very clear some of these other use cases at Google.
• ▶ 1:47:31 David Rosenthal Demand for all of this stuff that's coming out of Google brain is through the roof immediately.
• ▶ 1:47:37 Ben Gilbert It's just like everyone sort of expects some of this, whether it's computer vision in photos or speech recognition, like it's just becoming a thing that we expect, and it's going to flip Google's economics upside down if they don't have it.
• ▶ 1:48:44 Ben Gilbert It was at a Google satellite office in Madison, Wisconsin.
• ▶ 1:49:07 Ben Gilbert Because it's not like they're offering these in Google Cloud, at least at first.
• ▶ 1:49:13 Ben Gilbert So the whole thing was a complete secret for at least a year before they announced it at Google IO.
• ▶ 1:49:25 Ben Gilbert So that match ran on a single machine with four TPUs in Google Cloud.
• ▶ 1:49:30 Ben Gilbert And once that worked, obviously that gave Google a little bit of extra confidence to go really, really real production.
• ▶ 1:49:49 Ben Gilbert But today, Google, it's estimated, has two to three million TPUs.
• ▶ 1:50:05 Ben Gilbert Google has like an almost NVIDIA scale internal thing making their own ships at this point for their own and for Google Cloud customers.
• ▶ 1:50:05 Ben Gilbert Google has like an almost NVIDIA scale internal thing making their own ships at this point for their own and for Google Cloud customers.
• ▶ 1:50:19 David Rosenthal This is one of the great ironies and maddening things to OpenAI and Elon Musk is that OpenAI gets founded in 2015 with the goal of, hey, let's shake all this talent out of Google and level the playing field.
• ▶ 1:50:33 David Rosenthal And Google just accelerates.
• ▶ 1:50:38 Ben Gilbert That's the framework that Google Brain built to enable researchers to build and train and deploy machine learning models.