Topic
10 facts from 5 episodes, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
2011
Google Brain's 2011 cat paper trained a nine-layer neural network on unlabeled YouTube frames using 16,000 CPU cores on 1,000 machines.
“What they did was they trained a large nine-layer neural network to recognize cats from unlabeled frames of YouTube videos using 16,000 CPU cores on 1,000 different machines.”
2015
Maithra Raghu began collaborating with researchers at Google Brain in 2015, before OpenAI existed.
“I started collaborating, working with folks at Google Brain all the way back in 2015, and to put that in perspective for where the the AI space is right now, this was before OpenAI even existed.”
2017
Gomez got an internship with Lukasz Kaiser at Google Brain, which he later learned was meant for PhD students rather than undergraduates.
“So I, I somehow managed to get an internship with Lukasz Kaiser, uh, at at Google Brain, um, and I found out at the end of that internship, I wasn't supposed to have gotten that internship.”
2017-2020
Kenny Song worked at Google Brain as a product manager from 2017 to 2020, on a team building machine learning infrastructure.
“So in 2017 to 2020, I was working at Google Brain as a product manager, and, uh, my team was responsible for building machine learning infrastructure at Google.”
2017
Noam Shazeer rewrote the transformer team's code base from scratch, after which it outperformed the LSTM-based Google Translate.
“Noam joins the team, basically pulls a Jeff Dean, rewrites the entire code base from scratch.”
2017
The 2017 transformer paper "Attention Is All You Need" had been cited over 173,000 times by 2025.
“As of today, in 2025, this paper has been cited over 173,000 times in other academic papers, making it currently the seventh most cited paper of the 21st century.”
2019
Aidan Gomez founded Cohere in 2019 and, as a Google Brain intern, co-authored the 2017 paper 'Attention Is All You Need'.
“Aidan founded Cohere in 2019, but before that, during his time as an intern at Google Brain, he was a co-author on the landmark 2017 paper.”
2019
Raghu says that from Google Brain she saw large language model capabilities coming together around 2019 and 2020.
“sitting where I was in Google Brain, you started seeing the pieces come together in 2019, 2020 or so.”
Undated
Kenny Song previously worked at Google Brain on the TensorFlow team, according to Rick Kobayashi.
“Kenny is worked in, uh, uh, Google brains, and he was one of the core member of the TensorFlow team.”
Undated
DJ Patil said Andrew Ng started the Google Brain project along with Jeff Dean, Greg Corrado and Rajat Monga.
“Along with Jeff Dean, Greg, uh, Corrado, and uh, Rajat Monga, you started uh the Google uh DeepMind, uh, not the deep”
Episodes