Google: The AI Company
Acquired
Oct 06
Google: The AI Company
Google: The AI Company
Acquired
Oct 06
Google invented the foundational technology behind today’s AI revolution and assembled the brightest minds in the field long before competitors emerged. Yet despite its early lead, the company was blindsided by the rapid rise of ChatGPT—a product built on Google's own breakthroughs. This is the story of how internal inertia, strategic hesitation, and the weight of a $140B search empire left a tech giant scrambling to catch up in the very game it created.
Google's AI journey began in the early 2000s with language models improving search and translation, culminating in pivotal moments like Geoff Hinton's deep learning advocacy and the 'cat paper' that proved unsupervised learning at scale. The acquisition of DeepMind accelerated progress, leading to AlphaGo and major infrastructure innovations like TPUs. Despite creating the Transformer—the architecture behind modern LLMs—Google failed to capitalize quickly. Meanwhile, OpenAI, founded by former Google-affiliated researchers, leveraged Microsoft support to launch ChatGPT, forcing Google into crisis mode. Its rushed response with Bard backfired, but now unified under Gemini and advancing Waymo, Google is betting its future on AI integration across products, though monetization challenges remain as user behavior shifts away from traditional search.
09:04
09:04
Compressing data is equivalent to understanding it
20:39
20:39
Jeff Dean re-architected the algorithm to run in parallel, reducing translation time to 100 milliseconds
29:34
29:34
Geoff Hinton's 2007 tech talk at Google catalyzed the company's investment in deep learning.
39:00
39:00
Neural network learns to recognize cats from unlabeled YouTube videos using 16,000 CPU cores
44:57
44:57
AlexNet reduced image classification error rates from 25% to 15% in 2012
54:35
54:35
Google won the bid for DeepMind at $44 million during a NeurIPS conference auction
1:12:10
1:12:10
AI could pose a threat even on Mars
1:32:14
1:32:14
Ilya Sutskever was intrigued by the vision and became OpenAI's founding chief scientist
1:41:23
1:41:23
Google's $130 million GPU order gave NVIDIA confidence in neural networks
1:59:18
1:59:18
The Transformer architecture is elegant, scalable, and fundamentally different from prior neural network approaches.
2:23:32
2:23:32
ChatGPT's launch was accidental and overwhelmed servers within days
2:32:45
2:32:45
Sundar Pichai issues a 'code red' at Google after ChatGPT's success.
3:27:39
3:27:39
Google has all four key aspects of AI: application, model, cloud, and chips.
