Google faces the greatest innovator’s dilemma in history. They invented the Transformer — the breakthrough technology powering every modern AI system from ChatGPT to Claude (and, of course, Gemini). They employed nearly all the top AI talent: Ilya Sutskever, Geoff Hinton, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei — more or less everyone who leads modern AI worked at Google circa 2014. They built the best dedicated AI infrastructure (TPUs!) and deployed AI at massive scale years before anyone else. And yet… the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 caught them completely flat-footed. How on earth did the greatest business in history wind up playing catch-up to a nonprofit-turned-startup?
Today we tell the complete story of Google’s 20+ year AI journey: from their first tiny language model in 2001 through the creation Google Brain, the birth of the transformer, the talent exodus to OpenAI (sparked by Elon Musk’s fury over Google’s DeepMind acquisition), and their current all-hands-on-deck response with Gemini. And oh yeah — a little business called Waymo that went from crazy moonshot idea to doing more rides than Lyft in San Francisco, potentially building another Google-sized business within Google. This is the story of how the world’s greatest business faces its greatest test: can they disrupt themselves without losing their $140B annual profit-generating machine in Search?
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– When: October 20th, 4:00 PM PT
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0:00 The Innovator’s Dilemma: Google’s AI Challenge
4:36 From PageRank to language models: Google’s Early AI Foundations
17:21 Parallelizing Language: Jeff Dean’s Google Translate Revolution
24:05 Sebastian Thrun and Geoff Hinton: Laying Google X Foundations
35:10 Unsupervised Learning: Google Brain’s Cat Paper Breakthrough
47:05 From AlexNet to DeepMind: The GPU AI Revolution
1:00:02 The DeepMind Acquisition: AlphaGo and AI’s New Frontier
1:40:22 Building TPUs: Google’s Hardware Bet on AI
1:51:25 “Attention Is All You Need”: The Transformer’s Impact
2:04:01 Elon’s Exit, Microsoft’s Entry: OpenAI’s New Path
2:15:43 The Chat GPT Shockwave: Google’s Code Red Response
2:37:32 Unifying AI: Gemini and the Google DeepMind Merger
2:46:58 From DARPA Challenge to Robotaxis: Waymo’s Long Road
3:03:44 Waymo’s Billion-Dollar Potential and Google’s Financial Power
3:20:26 Google Cloud’s Strategic Role in the AI Ecosystem
3:32:31 Bull and Bear Cases on the Future of Google
3:53:10 Navigating the Innovator’s Dilemma: Google’s AI Strategy
3:54:34 NFL Summit Carveouts, and Outro
Links:
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Geoff Hinton’s 2007 Tech Talk at Google
https://youtu.be/AyzOUbkUf3M?si=sLQJsEwq-JEOQmIN
Our recent ACQ2 episode with Tobi Lutke
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/how-to-live-in-everyone-elses-future-with-shopify-ceo-tobi-lutke
Worldly Partners’ Multi-Decade Alphabet Study
https://worldlypartners.com/businesshistory
In the Plex
https://www.amazon.com/Plex-Google-Thinks-Works-Shapes/dp/1416596585
Supremecy
https://www.amazon.com/Supremacy-ChatGPT-Race-Change-World/dp/1250337747
Genius Makers
https://www.amazon.com/Genius-Makers-Mavericks-Brought-Facebook/dp/1524742678
All episode sources
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Carve Outs:
We’re hosting the Super Bowl Innovation Summit!
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F1: The Movie
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Travelpro suitcases
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Glue Guys Podcast
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Sea of Stars
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Stepchange Podcast
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Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.
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