Google, every mention
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every year 2025 anyone David Rosenthal 1231Ben Gilbert 1220Brendan Eich 76Steve Ballmer 8Mark Zuckerberg 8Michael Lewis 7Brad Gerstner 7Ben Thompson 6Eric Yuan 4Jason Calacanis 3
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Google comes up
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- ▶ 0:42 Ben Gilbert Is this the Google house?
- ▶ 0:45 Ben Gilbert The, where they had their first office in the garage?
- ▶ 0:47 David Rosenthal This is Google's first office right here.
- ▶ 0:49 David Rosenthal They gave it to us for the day.
- ▶ 2:49 Ben Gilbert We thought it'd be a fitting way to cap off the year of our three-part Google series to record in the literal garage where that nearly four trillion dollar company got started.
- ▶ 5:47 Michael Lewis Uh, uh, I was at Google Camp, which is kind of a good way to discover or acquire, uh, and.
- ▶ 5:55 Michael Lewis And we are, we are sitting in the Google, uh, garage, where.
- ▶ 6:01 Michael Lewis I'm not sure exactly what happened in the Google garage.
- ▶ 6:35 Ben Gilbert The one that they were using, because Google pulled it out of storage for us.
- ▶ 32:03 David Rosenthal Doing Google this year was timeless and timely.
- ▶ 33:45 David Rosenthal Like people didn't understand Trader Joe's, or people didn't understand Google, we thought.
- ▶ 39:18 David Rosenthal I think we only had a single Google doc that we worked out.
- ▶ 50:04 David Rosenthal There's, like, the obvious people to talk to, like, you know, for Google, we talk to, you know, Sundar, Demis, or, like, you know, like, obvious.
- ▶ 50:19 Michael Lewis And talk to the CEO of Google about Google.
- ▶ 55:47 Ben Gilbert Google was 40, probably, across the series.
- ▶ 58:28 Michael Lewis I guess Google still has this spirit where they're doing lots of stuff that maybe you can't identify instantly.
- ▶ 59:20 Ben Gilbert And like, boy, does Google have that.
- ▶ 59:22 Ben Gilbert I mean, you just, their last quarter was their first hundred billion dollar quarter ever.
- ▶ 59:28 Ben Gilbert And that's how they fund, you know, the next Gemini.
- ▶ 1:06:10 Ben Gilbert And since we recorded this episode in the garage where Google started, we thought this would be a fitting moment to talk about when a startup exits their proverbial garage phase and starts to become a real business.
- ▶ 1:06:23 David Rosenthal Yeah, garages were, were a little more popular back in the day with HP or Apple or in the nineties with Google and Amazon, all founded in garages.
- ▶ 1:07:23 Ben Gilbert We talked on our Google series about even with how successful they are today,
- ▶ 1:07:27 Ben Gilbert By initially ignoring the enterprise, Google left the door open to competitors for a while.
- ▶ 1:07:32 Ben Gilbert Google Docs and their original G Suite were so good.
- ▶ 1:07:32 Ben Gilbert Google Docs and their original G Suite were so good.
- ▶ 1:07:32 Ben Gilbert Google Docs and their original G Suite were so good.
- ▶ 1:07:46 David Rosenthal We were talking with WorkOS founder Michael Greenwich about this, and he was making an impassioned pitch to us that Google should have won the entire web-based productivity market, given they were first and they had better technology.
- ▶ 1:30:51 Michael Lewis Is this from Google?
- ▶ 1:31:09 David Rosenthal I mean, Google too.
- ▶ 1:31:11 David Rosenthal Google's founder controlled.
- ▶ 2:02:13 Michael Lewis But Tesla and NVIDIA and, and, and Microsoft and Google and they, people don't really get them explained to them.
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:33 Ben Gilbert Of course, listeners, this is Google today, and in perhaps the most classic textbook case of the innovator's dilemma,
- ▶ 2:41 Ben Gilbert The entire AI revolution that we are in right now is predicated by the invention of the transformer out of the Google brain team in 2017.
- ▶ 2:55 Ben Gilbert All the craziness right now depends on that one research paper published by Google in 2017.
- ▶ 3:03 Ben Gilbert Not only did Google have the densest concentration of AI talent in the world 10 years ago that led to this breakthrough,
- ▶ 3:09 Ben Gilbert But today, they have just about the best collection of assets that you could possibly ask for.
- ▶ 3:15 Ben Gilbert They've got a top tier AI model with Gemini.
- ▶ 3:17 Ben Gilbert They don't rely on some public cloud to host their model.
- ▶ 3:21 Ben Gilbert They have their own in Google Cloud that now does fifty billion dollars in revenue.
- ▶ 3:21 Ben Gilbert They have their own in Google Cloud that now does fifty billion dollars in revenue.
- ▶ 3:27 Ben Gilbert They're a chip company with their Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, which is the only real scale deployment of AI chips in the world besides Nvidia GPUs.
- ▶ 3:49 David Rosenthal Or you don't have an AI chip, you might just be a commodity in the AI market, and Google is the only company that has both.
- ▶ 3:58 Ben Gilbert Google still has a crazy bench of talent, and despite ChatGPT becoming kind of the Kleenex of the era, Google does still own the text box, the single one that is the front door to the internet for the vast majority of people anytime anyone…
- ▶ 4:15 Ben Gilbert But the question remains, what should Google do strategically?
- ▶ 4:19 Ben Gilbert Should they risk it all and lean into their birthright to win in artificial intelligence?
- ▶ 4:31 Ben Gilbert But perhaps first, we must answer the question, how did Google get here, David Rosenthal?
- ▶ 4:38 Ben Gilbert So listeners, today, we tell the story of Google, the AI company.
- ▶ 6:17 Ben Gilbert Google.
- ▶ 6:36 David Rosenthal As we've talked about before, were Google employees.
- ▶ 6:39 David Rosenthal Ilya Sitzkever, founding chief scientist of OpenAI, who along with Jeff Hinton and Alex Korczewski had done the seminal AI work on AlexNet and just published that a few years before all three of them were Google employees, as was Dario…
- ▶ 7:17 David Rosenthal Basically, every single person of note in AI worked at Google, with the one exception of Yann LeCun, who worked at Facebook.
- ▶ 7:27 Ben Gilbert It's pretty difficult to trace a big AI lab now back and not find Google in its origin story.
- ▶ 7:52 David Rosenthal This is how it was with AI and Google in the mid-twenty tens.
- ▶ 8:24 David Rosenthal Well, it goes back to the start of the company.
- ▶ 8:26 David Rosenthal I mean, Larry Page always thought of Google as an artificial intelligence company.
- ▶ 9:06 David Rosenthal I mean, if you squint, PageRank, the PageRank algorithm that Google was founded upon, is a statistical method.
- ▶ 9:24 David Rosenthal In the year, 2002 years after Google's founding, when Larry says artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google,
- ▶ 9:47 David Rosenthal It's always been an AI company.
- ▶ 9:58 David Rosenthal A Google engineer named Georges Herrick is talking over lunch with Ben Gomes, famous Google engineer who I think would go on to lead search, and a relatively new engineering hire named Noam Shazir.
- ▶ 10:13 David Rosenthal Now, Georges was one of Google's first 10 employees, incredible engineer, and just like Larry Page's dad, he had a PhD in machine learning from the University of Michigan.
- ▶ 12:11 Ben Gilbert Is this in one of Google's micro kitchens?
- ▶ 12:14 David Rosenthal This is in one of Google's micro kitchens.
- ▶ 12:20 David Rosenthal This is like a small little passage in Steven Levy's great book that's been a source for all of our Google episodes, In the Plex.
- ▶ 12:54 David Rosenthal And if they can do that, that that would be good for Google.
- ▶ 14:15 David Rosenthal So the first thing that they do with this work is they create the did you mean spelling correction in Google search.
- ▶ 14:28 David Rosenthal So this is huge for Google because obviously it's a bad user experience when you mistype a query and then need to type another one, but it's a tax to Google's infrastructure because every time these mistyped queries are going, well,…
- ▶ 15:46 David Rosenthal AdSense.
- ▶ 15:47 David Rosenthal They need a way to understand the content of these third party web pages, the publishers, in order to run the Google ad corpus against them.
- ▶ 16:04 David Rosenthal So Jeff Dean borrows Phil and famously uses it to code up his implementation of AdSense in a week, because he's Jeff Dean.
- ▶ 16:14 David Rosenthal And boom, AdSense.
- ▶ 16:17 David Rosenthal I mean, this is billions of dollars of new revenue to Google overnight because it's the same corpus of ads that are AdWords that are search ads that they're now serving on third party pages.
- ▶ 16:17 David Rosenthal I mean, this is billions of dollars of new revenue to Google overnight because it's the same corpus of ads that are AdWords that are search ads that they're now serving on third party pages.
- ▶ 16:39 Ben Gilbert Jeff Dean is going to be the through line of this episode of, wait, how did Google pull that off?
- ▶ 16:44 Ben Gilbert How did Jeff Dean just go home and over the weekend rewrite some entire giant distributed system and figure out all of Google's problems?
- ▶ 16:52 Ben Gilbert Back when Chuck Norris facts were big, Jeff Dean facts became a thing internally at Google.
- ▶ 17:35 David Rosenthal Definitely going to drive a lot of value for Google.
- ▶ 17:38 David Rosenthal And they also fit pretty beautifully into Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
- ▶ 17:54 David Rosenthal So Phil gets so big that apparently by the mid-two thousands, Phil is using 15% of Google's entire data center infrastructure.
- ▶ 18:04 David Rosenthal And I assume a lot of that is AdSense ad serving, but also Did You Mean and all the other stuff that they start using it for within Google.
- ▶ 18:04 David Rosenthal And I assume a lot of that is AdSense ad serving, but also Did You Mean and all the other stuff that they start using it for within Google.
- ▶ 18:26 David Rosenthal Google had just recently launched the Google Translate product.
- ▶ 18:26 David Rosenthal Google had just recently launched the Google Translate product.
- ▶ 18:30 David Rosenthal This is the era of all the great, great products coming out of Google that we've talked about, you know, Maps and Gmail and Docs and all the wonderful things that Chrome and Android are going to come later.
- ▶ 18:30 David Rosenthal This is the era of all the great, great products coming out of Google that we've talked about, you know, Maps and Gmail and Docs and all the wonderful things that Chrome and Android are going to come later.
- ▶ 18:30 David Rosenthal This is the era of all the great, great products coming out of Google that we've talked about, you know, Maps and Gmail and Docs and all the wonderful things that Chrome and Android are going to come later.
- ▶ 18:30 David Rosenthal This is the era of all the great, great products coming out of Google that we've talked about, you know, Maps and Gmail and Docs and all the wonderful things that Chrome and Android are going to come later.
- ▶ 18:40 Ben Gilbert They had like a 10 year run where they basically launched everything you know of at Google except for search.
- ▶ 18:40 Ben Gilbert They had like a 10 year run where they basically launched everything you know of at Google except for search.
- ▶ 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.
- ▶ 19:05 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.
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