Sebastian Thrun, every mention

Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired Oct 6, 2025 · 28 mentions

• ▶ 7:05 David Rosenthal Jen Thrun, Noam Shazir, all the DeepMind folks, Demis Hassabis, Shane Legge, Mustafa Suleiman.
• ▶ 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
• ▶ 24:34 David Rosenthal Sebastian was the head of SAIL at Stanford, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, legendary AI laboratory that was big in the sort of first wave of AI back in the sixties, seventies, when Larry's dad was active in the field,…
• ▶ 24:55 David Rosenthal And Sebastian was the leader, the head of SAIL.
• ▶ 24:59 Ben Gilbert Funny story about Sebastian, the way that he actually comes to Google.
• ▶ 25:02 Ben Gilbert Sebastian was kind enough to speak with us to prep for this episode.
• ▶ 26:08 David Rosenthal Another undergrad who passed through sale while Sebastian was there was a young freshman and sophomore who would later drop out of Stanford to start a company that went through Y Combinator's very first
• ▶ 27:16 David Rosenthal So April, 2007, Sebastian comes over from sale into Google.
• ▶ 27:20 David Rosenthal Sebastian Thrun.
• ▶ 28:07 Ben Gilbert And Sebastian's first thing was Street View, right?
• ▶ 29:02 David Rosenthal So on the back of this win with ground truth, Sebastian starts lobbying to Larry and Sergey.
• ▶ 29:40 David Rosenthal So in December of 2007, Sebastian brings in a relatively little known machine learning professor from the University of Toronto named Jeff
• ▶ 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
• ▶ 33:43 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.
• ▶ 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…
• ▶ 34:45 David Rosenthal Sebastian leads himself.
• ▶ 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.
• ▶ 37:48 David Rosenthal So what does Sebastian do?
• ▶ 37:55 David Rosenthal And this coincides right with the start of X, and Sebastian formalizing this division.
• ▶ 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…
• ▶ 2:48:45 Ben Gilbert Two of them were from Carnegie Mellon, and one was from Stanford, led by a name that all of you will now recognize, Sebastian Thrun.
• ▶ 2:48:56 Ben Gilbert This is Sebastian's origin story before Google.
• ▶ 2:48:59 Ben Gilbert Now, as we said, Sebastian was kind enough to help us with prep for this episode, but I actually learned most of this from watching a twenty-year-old Nova documentary that is available on Amazon Prime Video, thanks to Brett Taylor for…
• ▶ 2:52:42 David Rosenthal Larry came to Sebastian and was like, yo, that's self-driving car stuff.
• ▶ 2:52:48 David Rosenthal And Sebastian was like, no, come on, that was a DARPA challenge.
• ▶ 2:53:08 Ben Gilbert And Sebastian goes home, has a sleep on it, and he comes in the next morning and he goes, I realize what it was.
• ▶ 2:54:57 Ben Gilbert And there was what Sebastian wanted, which was Highway Assist, sort of the lowest stakes, most realistic, let's make a better cruise control.
• ▶ 4:03:48 David Rosenthal Max Ross, Liz Reed, Josh Woodward, Greg Corrado, Sebastian Thrun, Anna Patterson, Brett Taylor, Clay Bevor, Demis Hassabis, Thomas Kurian, Sundar Pichai,