1996
Larry Page and Sergey Brin named their early project BackRub because it used backlinks to rank web pages.
“They decide that they're going to call the project BackRub, since it uses backlinks for ranking web pages.”
Topic
206 facts from 91 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.
1996
Larry Page and Sergey Brin named their early project BackRub because it used backlinks to rank web pages.
“They decide that they're going to call the project BackRub, since it uses backlinks for ranking web pages.”
1998
Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos invested $250,000 of their own money in Google at the seed price.
“he convinces Larry and Sergey to take another $250,000 of Jeff and Mackenzie's personal money.”
1998
Google's seed round raised about $1 million at a $10 million post-money valuation, with investors including Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton, Ram Shriram and Jeff Bezos.
“all in, they end up raising a million dollars, had a $10 million post-money valuation.”
1998
Ghodsi said Amazon.com and Google already existed in 1998, using them to argue that today's AI infrastructure companies can survive new app waves.
“there was actually an Amazon.com already in 98, there was already, uh, Google actually existed already in 98 and so on.”
1999
Google's first revenue came from an enterprise search deal with Red Hat for $20,000.
“They sold this enterprise search deal to Red Hat for $20,000.”
1999
Google's deal to power search on Netscape's directory brought about 3 million searches per day.
“So the Netscape deal brought in 3 million total searchers per day.”
2000s
Kevin Scott said Google put many of its compiler specialists on his interview panel, and he joined the new Google New York office as about the tenth person.
“they took what must have been every compiler person in the company at the time and put them on my interview panel.”
2000
In June 2000 Google signed a deal to power Yahoo's organic search results, and Yahoo invested $10 million in Google.
“And Yahoo is going to invest $10 million in Google as part of this deal.”
2000
The host says users with the Google Toolbar installed averaged seven times as many searches, which justified paying to bundle it with other software.
“Once Google Toolbar was installed, a user averaged seven times the number of searches.”
mid-2000s
By the mid-2000s the Phil language model reportedly used 15% of Google's data center infrastructure.
“Phil gets so big that apparently by the mid 2000s, Phil is using 15% of Google's entire data center infrastructure.”
2001
Google adopted Overture's pay-per-click and auction model in 2001 and added a second-price auction and click-through rate in ad ranking.
“They borrow the rest of the model from Overture with the cost per click payment basis and the auction model.”
2001
Google earned $86 million in revenue and $10 million in profit in 2001.
“Google for the year ultimately did $86 million in revenue that year and $10 million in profit.”
2001-2011
Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011.
“Eric was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, and has since become one of the leading voices on AI, advising governments, writing books, and arguing that AI will change the world more than most of us expect.”
2002
Google's revenue rose to about $440 million in 2002 while it moved advertisers to the new AdWords model.
“In 2002, the company did $440 million of revenue.”
2002
In the summer 2002 AOL deal, Google agreed to share 85% of the search ad revenue with AOL, guarantee $100 million, and grant AOL options on 7.4 million shares at $3.
“Google will then share back 85 cents on the dollar to AOL for all of that revenue.”
2003
AOL earned $35 million from the Google deal in the second half of 2002 and $200 million in 2003, well above the $100 million guarantee.
“AOL made $35 million in 2002, the first half year of the deal alone. And then in 2003, made $200 million.”
2003
Google's revenue reached about $1.5 billion in 2003, with nearly $350 million in operating income.
“2003, that explodes to $1.5 billion in revenue and almost $350 million in operating income.”
2003
Google engineers built an early large language model nicknamed Phil, short for probabilistic hierarchical inferential learner.
“language model that they call affectionately Phil, the probabilistic hierarchical inferential learner.”
2004
Google bought the companies behind Google Maps for about $70 million around 2004, and Maps was estimated to earn about $3 billion in revenue.
“Bought for $70 million, doing about $3 billion in revenue 16 years later.”
2004
Colin Huang graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2004 and joined Google that summer, about six months before Google's IPO.
“He graduates from Madison in 2004. Shows up that summer, six months before the Google IPO.”
2004
Taylor says Gmail, launched in the middle of 2004, was among the most advanced web applications when Google Maps was being built.
“probably the most advanced web applications at the time was probably Gmail, which had launched in the middle of 2004.”
2004
The host says Google was the first major tech company to use a dual-class share structure giving founders super-voting control.
“Google was the first tech company to do this.”
2004
Google's 2004 Dutch-auction IPO priced at $85 per share, a $23 billion market cap, raising $1.7 billion.
“Well, the actual price where they end up filling the order is at $85 a share. Yep. Which gives Google a $23 billion market cap at IPO. And they raise $1.7 billion.”
2004
Google launched Gmail on April 1, 2004 with one gigabyte of free storage per user, far more than Yahoo Mail or Hotmail offered.
“Web-based email from Google with one gigabyte of free storage for every single user.”
2004
Google launched Gmail on April 1, 2004 as an invite-only service, starting with 1,000 seed invitations.
“When they launch it on April 1st, 2004, they send out 1,000 seed invites to Gmail.”
2004
Google acquired Where 2 Technologies, whose web-based mapping application became the core of Google Maps.
“So Google ends up buying Where To. That becomes the core of Google Maps.”
2004-2014
Nikesh Arora was a senior vice president and chief business officer at Google from 2004 to 2014.
“previously, he was the SVP and CBO of Google during its massive growth phase from 2004 to 2014.”
2004
Ramaswamy says PageRank's usefulness faded by about 2004 or 2005, after which click behavior on search results became more important to Google.
“But PageRank ran out of juice, like in six years, like 2004, five.”
2005
Google bought Android in 2005 for $50 million.
“Android, $50 million to buy this thing.”
2005
Google's full-year 2005 revenue was $6.1 billion, almost double its 2004 revenue of about $3.1 billion.
“Full year 2005 revenue, $6.1 billion. That's almost double the 3.1 that it was in 2004, the first year it went public.”
2005
Google bought Android, Andy Rubin's mobile software startup, in July 2005 for $50 million.
“So July 2005, Google buys Android for $50 million.”
2006
Google acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion.
“So big acquisition price. I mean, this is a $1.65 billion acquisition.”
2006
Colin Huang was one of two leaders of a secret Google team planning a China launch of Google search.
“he gets put on a secret team at Google. He's one of two people leading the team for secret plans to launch Google in China.”
2006
Writely, the word processor that became Google Docs, launched in August 2005 and was bought by Google in March 2006.
“The product launched August 2005. Google bought the company March 2006.”
2006
Google bought YouTube in November 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock, less than 18 months after the site launched.
“So, in November 2006, which is less than 18 months after the product launched, Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.”
2007
Google bought DoubleClick in April 2007 for $3.1 billion in cash.
“Google decided to basically double that a few months later in April of 2007 when they bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in cash.”
2007
Google earned $16.5 billion in revenue in 2007, the year it launched Universal Search, and became the world's largest seller of advertising.
“That year, when they launched Universal Search, they do $16.5 billion in revenue.”
2007
Google announced the Open Handset Alliance in November 2007, with partners including HTC, Motorola, Samsung and T-Mobile.
“Google announces the formation of the Open Handset Alliance.”
2008
Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in 2008, and the hosts estimated its descendant ad businesses contribute about $22 billion of Google revenue.
“So they bought it for $3.1 billion in 2008. The current revenue contribution of this segment within Google is just a hair under $22 billion.”
2008
Eich says Google Chrome was released on September 1, 2008.
“Chrome came out in September 1st, 2008.”
2008
Eich says Google acquired DoubleClick in 2008, a company that had been operating since 1999.
“The company that Google acquired as DoubleClick in 2008 was operating in 99.”
2008
Google launched the Chrome browser in early September 2008, about a week before Lehman Brothers collapsed.
“They launch it in early September of 2008, like a week before Lehman goes down.”
2010
Twitter recruited Alex Redder from Google to run ads engineering and build its ad platform.
“The person who ended up running ads engineering, Alex Redder, and built that, we recruited out of Google.”
2011
Wavy, the startup where Dan Lewis worked, was acquired by Google around 2010 or 2011, and its team moved to Google's Bay Area machine intelligence group.
“So the company was acquired in 2011, if I remember correctly, or in 2010, 2011.”
2012
Geoffrey Hinton's team ended the auction for DNN Research at $44 million and chose to join Google.
“they stop the bidding at $44 million and just say, Google, this is more than enough money.”
2012
In 2012, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee rode in a Google self-driving car from Mountain View to San Francisco, after writing Race Against the Machine.
“Actually, it was 2012, right after we wrote Race Against the Machine, we rode from Mountain View up to San Francisco.”
2014
After learning WhatsApp had a meeting with Google's Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg invited Jan Koum to his house on February 10, 2014, to propose an acquisition.
“Somehow, Facebook and Zach find out that this meeting is scheduled. And he gets Jan over to his house the Monday night before February 10th.”
2014
Google acquired DeepMind about a year after it acquired the AlexNet team's startup.
“So about a year later, Google also acquires DeepMind, famously.”
2014
Google acquired DeepMind for $550 million and the deal set up an independent oversight board.
“$550 million U.S. There's an independent oversight board that is set up to make sure that the mission and goals of DeepMind are actually being followed.”
2014
Google's order of 40,000 NVIDIA GPUs, costing $130 million, was personally approved by Larry Page over finance's objections.
“That's a big enough price tag that the request gets elevated to Larry Page, who personally approves it, even though finance wanted to kill it.”
2015
Sundar Pichai has been CEO of Google since 2015 and also leads its parent company Alphabet, which the host says had a market value above $800 billion.
“He's the CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet, a company with a market value of more than $800 billion. He's been its CEO since 2015.”
2015
Google's revenue at the end of 2015 was about $75 billion, according to the hosts.
“So at the end of 15, it's gotten huge. It's $75 billion in revenue.”
2015
Google designed, verified, built and deployed its first tensor processing unit in 15 months.
“So the TPU was designed, verified, built, and deployed into data centers in 15 months.”
2016
In 2016, while at Google, Dario Amodei co-wrote the paper 'Concrete Problems in AI Safety' with colleagues, some of whom later co-founded Anthropic.
“I wrote a paper called, With some colleagues, some of whom are now Anthropic co-founders, Concrete problems in AI safety”
2017
The transformer's attention mechanism scales quadratically, so doubling the input length quadruples the compute cost.
“doubling your input means quadrupling the cost to compute an output, or tripling your input means nine times the cost.”
2017
DeepMind's AlphaGo beat the world champion at Go, and its AlphaGo Zero version learned by playing against itself without human game data.
“7 years ago, uh, you know, DeepMind, uh, as part of Google, uh, produced the AlphaGo model, which was able to beat the world champion in Go”
2017
Google researchers invented the Transformer architecture and published the paper in June 2017.
“because Google invented the Transformer and published the paper in June of 2017.”
2018
Eich says that in September 2018 Google began signing users into Chrome automatically when they signed into Gmail or YouTube.
“in 2018, September, Google said, gosh darn it, people aren't signing into the browser enough.”
2018
Jain says Google released BERT-based models openly in late 2018.
“Google had actually put, uh, BERT based models in open domain in late 2018, and they were able to use them.”
2019
Google reported YouTube as a revenue segment of about $15 billion a year in its most recent earnings.
“A fast-growing revenue segment of $15 billion a year.”
2019
Google's Play Store was estimated to have handled just under $30 billion in total sales in 2019, with Google taking a 30% cut.
“Google is going to do, by estimates, Google did about just under $30 billion in total gross merchandise value in the Play Store last year in 2019.”
2020
It has been reported that Google pays Apple about $9 billion a year to remain the default search engine on the iPhone.
“it is reported that Google currently pays Apple about $9 billion a year in order to keep Google as the default search engine on the iPhone.”
2020
On August 13, 2020, Epic pushed a Fortnite update offering a discount on V-Bucks for direct purchases, after which Apple and Google removed the game from their stores.
“finally on August 13th, 2020 Epic pushes a new version of Fortnite to the iOS app store”
2020
Google had to do custom work to build the Google Docs sharing integration inside Slack.
“Like that was custom work that Google had to do in order to enable that in Slack.”
2020
David Luan says Google had an internal chatbot project, called Lambda or Mina, in 2020 that was available only to Google employees and resembled ChatGPT.
“There was a project called Lambda or Mina at Google in the, uh, in 2020 that basically was ChatGPT before ChatGPT, but only available to Google employees.”
2022
David Rosenthal said AWS was growing 37% on a $75 billion base, while Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure grew about 45% but had a combined share smaller than Amazon's.
“AWS is growing at 37% annually on a $75 billion base. Google and Microsoft are growing at 45% but their market share combined is still significantly less than Amazon.”
2023
Ethan Mollick says a controlled study found Google's medical AI model gave advice at least equal to doctors' advice for common illnesses.
“some of the fine-tuned models, like Google's medical model, is giving in, uh, you know, another controlled study is giving advice that's at least equal to that of doctors to patients with common illnesses”
2023
Ethan Mollick says Google has by far the largest AI research team and has been cautiously rolling out products.
“Google has by far the largest research team on AI, and they've been cautiously rolling out products and have specialized products in different industries that might happen soon.”
2023
Pichai says Deutsche Bank is a Google client that uses generative AI to give insights to its financial analysts.
“we have clients like Deutsche Bank is now using generative AI to give insights to their financial analysts.”
2023
Pichai says PaLM 2 was the model Google had in production and launched across its products at the time of the interview.
“The model in production, which we are using across our products and which we have launched is Palm two.”
2023
Pichai says the interview came in Google's seventh year as an AI-first company.
“this is our seventh year, you know, as an AI first company.”
2023
Pichai says Google has been more conservative than some rivals in releasing generative AI because of the scale at which it serves users.
“as Google, we've been, uh, more conservative in our approach, given the scale at which we serve users.”
2023
Pichai says Google has built generative AI into more than 25 of its products, including Gmail, Google Docs, Search and YouTube.
“we have incorporated generative AI in over twenty five of our products, be it Gmail or Google Docs or search or YouTube and so on.”
2023
Pichai says Google uses red teams whose explicit goal is to break its AI models so weaknesses can be fixed.
“we have red teams whose explicit goal is to break these models in various possible ways.”
2023
Pichai says Google was still working on watermarking and metadata so AI-generated images can be identified and traced.
“still in the process of doing this work, but we are doing work to add watermarking and metadata.”
2023
Pichai says Wendy's was using generative AI so customers can order by voice at the drive-through.
“Wendy's has used generative AI so that people can, you know, use voice and as part of that drive-through, you know, order and and the system works that way.”
2023
Pichai says Google's AI ambition covers four areas: improving knowledge and learning, boosting creativity and productivity, enabling others to use AI, and doing it safely.
“first is to improve knowledge and learning, second is boosting creativity and productivity, third, which has been important to us.”
2023
Brad Smith described the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership as competing with Google and its DeepMind acquisition, with Anthropic as a third frontier group.
“you have every day this partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft competing with, say, Google and its acquisition of Deep Mind.”
2023
Tom Davenport said OpenAI had a little over 300 employees, far fewer than Google's many thousands, yet still beat Google to market with generative AI.
“OpenAI was sort of an interesting example because they had 300 and something people employed there, compared to what 80 zero at Google, or maybe it's even bigger, but they still beat them to market.”
2023
Geoffrey Hinton says he timed his departure from Google so he could speak freely about AI safety at an MIT conference organised by MIT Technology Review.
“The precise timing of when I left Google was so that I could talk freely at a conference at M I T”
2023
Google's stock fell 8% on the day of the Bard launch keynote in February 2023.
“After the Bard launch and this keynote, Google stock drops 8% on that day.”
2024
Lex Fridman cited a controversy in which Google's Gemini image generation produced historically inaccurate images such as Black Nazis and Black founding fathers.
“The Gemini 1.5 came out recently. There's a lot of drama around it, speaking of theatrical things, and it generated, uh, Black Nazis and Black founding fathers.”
2024
Yarats referred to a recent leak of Google's ranking signals as an example of how SEO practitioners learn what to manipulate.
“there was like, a couple of weeks ago, there was a a a leak, right?”
2024
Dario Amodei noted that Google and Amazon build their own AI chips, and that Anthropic collaborates with both.
“Google is building their own, you know, chips, as we know. Amazon is building their own chips”
2024
Kahn cites a Google Olympics ad in which a child's fan letter was written with AI as an example of AI used where human connection matters, and says it drew backlash.
“I think there's a great example with that Google Olympics ad where they had the kid writing the fan letter”
2024
Ben Gilbert says Google paid out $55 billion in total traffic acquisition costs in the year before the episode, including about $20 billion to Apple.
“So Google paid out last year, and I'm just using the current numbers to try to figure out what the splits have always been. They paid out last year $55 billion in total traffic acquisition costs.”
2024
Google paid about $2.7 billion in 2024 for a licensing deal with Character AI that brought Noam Shazeer back to Google.
“And then Google ultimately in 2024, after ChatGPT launches, pays $2.7 billion, I think, to do a licensing deal with Character AI, the net of which Noam comes back to Google.”
2025
Alex Heath says Google hired the Windsurf team after Windsurf could not complete a sale to OpenAI.
“Google ultimately ended up hiring that team from Windsurf, is that the company wasn't able to sell to OpenAI”
2025
Alex Heath cites Google's deal with Windsurf and Meta's deal with Scale AI as later examples of 'reverse acquihires'.
“And, you know, the most recent example is Windsurf and Google, and then there was Scale AI and Meta before that.”
2025
In the US antitrust case a judge ruled Google a monopoly in internet search but ordered no material remedies.
“The judge first ruled that Google was a monopoly in Internet search and then did not come up with any material remedies.”
2025
Google generated about $370 billion in revenue over the 12 months before the episode.
“Over the last 12 months, Google has generated $370 billion in revenue.”
2025
Google's token processing across its services rose from about 10 trillion in April 2024 to almost 500 trillion in April 2025.
“In April of 24, Google was processing 10 trillion tokens across all their services. In April of 25, that was almost 500 trillion.”
2025
Google launched Gemini Enterprise, a single stack combining AI and agent creation, deployment and management.
“just yesterday, we launched something called Gemini Enterprise, which brings together all the different pieces of AI and agent creation and, uh, deployment and management into one singular, uh, stack and package.”
2025
A UK telecom company is working with Google on a multimodal support experience for diagnosing Wi-Fi outages.
“there's a telco in, um, the UK that's doing this right now, uh, that we're working with.”
2025
Google released Gemini CLI, built by a small team, and it saw rapid uptake.
“So Gemini CLI, you know, it was this thing that we just released. It was a small team that worked on it, and, you know, it exploded immediately.”
2025
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said when asked about his AI use that he was vibe coding, according to Will Grannis.
“our CEO Sundar was asked, you know, hey, you know, what are you doing with AI? And he's like, I'm vibe coding”
2025
Nano Banana is Google's latest image generation model, which accepts images and prompts as input.
“So, NanoBanana is our image generation model, uh, latest image generation model.”
2025
Veo is Google's video creation model.
“Veo is a video creation model that we have under the hood, a multimodal model.”
2025
Google offers a Gemini Live API enabling live camera-based interaction with AI.
“We have a Gemini Live API, and I mentioned that that use case earlier of being able to take your phone, flip it around, show it something”
2025
Google released the Agent Payment Protocol (AP2), joining MCP and the agent-to-agent protocol A2A in the agent standards stack.
“we just released the agent payment protocol, AP2, as part of this kind of standardization stack. So MCP A2A, which is the agent to agent protocol, and now the agent payment protocol.”
2025
Sean Fitzpatrick says Microsoft, Amazon and Google are each investing close to $100 billion in foundational AI models.
“each one of them is putting in, you know, uh, close to $100 billion, you know, Microsoft, uh, Amazon, Google.”
2025
Stack Overflow says it has data licensing partnerships with most major AI labs and cloud hyperscalers, including Google and OpenAI.
“we've struck effectively partnership agreements with every single AI lab that you can think of for the for the most part”
2025
Chandrasekar said Google's Gemini 3 outperformed other models and prompted code red responses at competing AI companies.
“It blows every other model out of the water, and now we've got a code red situation in other companies, other LLMs, competition.”
2026
Blitzy currently uses models from three developers: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.
“we use the three major families of models in in Blitzy today: OpenAI, Google, and, uh, Anthropic.”
2026
Tim Crawford names IBM's Granite, Amazon Web Services' Nova and Google's Gemini as models whose makers are building in safety measures.
“whether it's granite from IBM, Nova from AWS, Gemini from, uh, Google, for example, they are putting safety measures in the mix.”
2026
Chris Benson says the report cites Gemini Deep Think earning an International Mathematical Olympiad gold medal while reading analog clocks accurately only part of the time.
“The example they talk about is Gemini Deep Think getting the gold medal at the IMO.”
2026
The foundation's projects include MCP, AGENTS.md, Goose and Agent Gateway, and Google's A2A protocol joined in the week of recording.
“right now the projects are MCP agent, SMD, Goose, um, agent, Gateway, and then also just this week, uh, A2A, which is Google's agent to agent protocol”
Undated
Leone says the 'never paid so much for so little' remark about Google was made by John Doerr to Mike Moritz.
“I think that quote is what John Doerr told Mike Moritz.”
Undated
Calacanis says Google's search changes removed about 90% of Mahalo's traffic, forcing layoffs.
“Anyway, then they basically took 90% of our traffic away.”
Undated
Amazon tried to launch in Mexico without Google search advertising, showing its concern about relying on Google, and the launch struggled until it turned Google advertising on.
“they tried to launch in Mexico without Google. And it was a great illustration of how concerned Bezos and Jeff Wilkie were”
Undated
Ben Gilbert says many people thought Google was making a mistake with YouTube because the service lost billions of dollars for more than a decade.
“Famously, everybody thought that Google was nuts with YouTube because it lost billions of dollars for more than a decade.”
Undated
Zoom's early search-engine marketing payment to Google exceeded $200,000 a month, according to the exchange between the hosts and Eric Yuan.
“Do you remember how large that check was for context? That's more than $200,000 a month.”
Undated
Katherine Boyle says Google pulled out of the JEDI cloud contract because some employees did not want to work with the Department of Defense.
“that was a good example of, say, Google pulling out of working with government because they had employees who didn't necessarily want to work with the DoD.”
Undated
The hosts say Stanford took only about 1% of Google, while many universities seek 25% to 50% or more in technology transfer.
“Stanford only took 1% of Google when it was a Stanford, you know, graduate research project, when most universities want 25, 50 plus percent of anything”
Undated
Matthew Walker says Google provides nap pods and quiet 'shh rooms' on its campus where employees can nap.
“on their campus, they will have these nap pods, and they will have these what are called shh rooms, where you can go and you can take a nap.”
Undated
Kevin Scott said his team at Google won a Google Founders Award for solving an unglamorous problem using advanced computer science.
“the whole team won a Google Founders Award, which was a big deal”
Undated
Pichai says Google has found that two programmers working together do better than two working separately, a practice called pair programming.
“do something called pair programming. We have found that two programmers working together are better than them working separately.”
Undated
Pichai says Google had internally built a conversational system called LaMDA, based on large language models, before ChatGPT became public.
“internally, we had built what was called Lambda. Internally, we had built a conversational dialogue based on, uh, these large language models”
Undated
Pichai says Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, and that AI lets it pursue that mission more ambitiously.
“having a mission to organize the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful.”
Undated
Pichai cites Google's work on quantum computing as one of its most ambitious moonshot projects.
“we are trying to solve quantum computing, uh, which is as moon shoty as it gets”
Undated
Davenport says companies are making deals with providers like OpenAI or Google so their prompts do not enter the providers' models, addressing intellectual property concerns.
“We don't want our prompts to make it into your model. That solves a lot of the problems relative to intellectual property ownership”
Undated
Google's first internal generative AI uses were in Workspace, covering documents and email, such as summarizing and personalizing text.
“Was was around workspace, just using our documentation, our email. You all, I'm sure, use it. So it was like, can you summarize this better?”
Undated
Gandhi said Google was investing heavily in its next TPU generation, which he referred to as V5, with a focus on scaling inference.
“We have V5V, etcetera. We are investing, uh, heavily, and you know, others are doing.”
Undated
Before Slack, Jackie Rocca spent more than six years at Google, working on YouTube and on the launch team for YouTube TV.
“Before Slack, I spent six plus years at Google, specifically on YouTube, and was fortunate to be on the launch team for YouTube TV.”
Undated
Aidan Gomez said the Transformer architecture was originally built to improve machine translation at Google.
“we were making good progress on translation, which is what we built the transformer for”
Undated
Aidan Gomez said his early Transformer language models at Google were trained only on Wikipedia and could write only Wikipedia-style articles.
“It was just trained on Wikipedia, and so the model could only write Wikipedia articles.”
Undated
Yarats argued that users who click through from Perplexity have higher intent than those who click through from Google.
“when they go, they have like much higher, uh, intent, right?”
Undated
Google's first campus was a former Silicon Graphics campus, according to Bret Taylor.
“When Google moved from its office in Mountain View to its first campus, it was the Silicon Graphics campus.”
Undated
Bret Taylor describes early Google as vertically integrated, building everything from data centers to the search engine.
“it was a very vertically integrated company, the way it built data centers all the way through the search engine.”
Undated
Taylor names the Transformer architecture, introduced in the Google paper 'Attention Is All You Need', as the most meaningful AI breakthrough of the past decade.
“Probably the most meaningful breakthrough over the past decade was the Transformers model, which was a paper out of Google called Attention Is All You Need”
Undated
Taylor compares the AI boom to the dot-com bubble, noting that failures like Webvan and Pets.com coexisted with lasting companies like Amazon, Google, eBay, PayPal and Salesforce.
“In the same way you had Webvan and Pets.com, but you also had Amazon, Google, eBay, PayPal, Salesforce, and others come out of it.”
Undated
Bret Taylor expects personal AI agents to be built mainly by very large consumer companies such as Apple, Google and OpenAI.
“the domain of personal agents is probably of the very large consumer companies like Apple and Google and OpenAI and others that have big consumer brands.”
Undated
Bret Taylor compares outcome-based pricing for AI software to the advertising shift from impression-based ads to cost-per-click ads.
“reminds me a little bit of going to from impression-based ads to cost-per-click-based ads.”
Undated
Sridhar Ramaswamy previously led Google's AdWords division, which the host says generated over $100 billion in yearly revenue.
“And before that, he was the leader of AdWords at Google, a division that generated over $100 billion of of revenue yearly.”
Undated
Ramaswamy cites deciding when Google Search should show the weather box as an example of a problem language models can solve effectively.
“When should the weather one box trigger on Google search?”
Undated
Rabinovich says his Google team released Google Goggles, described as the first AR app for both Android and iOS, which is now the lens feature in Pixel phones.
“we released the world's first AR app for both Android and iOS. That was called Google Goggles. Today, that's the lens feature in the Pixel phones.”
Undated
Rabinovich says his team at Google developed the Inception neural network, which powered many Google products including visual search in Google Photos.
“we developed the most advanced neural network at a time called the Inception, and that powered a large number of products within Google”
Undated
Kahn says Google's search links prompt users to consider where information comes from, which generative AI chatbot answers do not.
“one of the good things about Google is at least you have these links, so you have to think about, you know, where's the information coming from?”
Undated
Rana El Kaliouby says the Transformers paper was written by Google researchers and kickstarted the rise of generative AI.
“The Transformers paper Brett is talking about was written by researchers at Google, and it kickstarted the rise of generative AI.”
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Karaboutis says software and technology companies such as Microsoft and Google are rushing to use AI for competitive advantage.
“Software tech companies, I think, are rushing for advantage, no question. We're taking a look, whether it's the Microsofts, the the Googles, et cetera”
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Rana El Kaliouby said she used Google's NotebookLM to generate a podcast episode of an imaginary version of herself talking with her executive coach.
“I recently tried out Google's NotebookLM. I actually had it create a podcast episode of an imaginary Rana in conversation with my executive coach.”
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Warren Buffett said Geico was paying about $10 per click for Google ads that cost Google essentially nothing to deliver.
“we were paying $10 a click for something that had a marginal cost to Google of exactly zero”
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Sridhar Ramaswamy says about half of Google Ads revenue is generated without any human sales contact.
“50% of this absurd amount of revenue that Google makes is without ever talking to people.”
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Sridhar Ramaswamy says an outage of Google search ads cost thousands of dollars every second.
“If search ads went down, you were literally losing thousands of dollars every single second.”
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Nikesh Arora recalled Larry Page telling him that technology companies die when they stop focusing on product.
“if you look at technology companies over time, technology companies die when they stop focusing on product and start focusing on other things.”
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Nikesh Arora said that, drawing on his time at Google, he concluded that cloud and AI would be the two most important technology trends.
“I said, look, the two most important things from a technology perspective would be cloud and A I.”
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Mollick said Google has a feature in which an AI phones restaurants that don't take online reservations to book a table.
“If you try and book a table at a restaurant that, uh, that doesn't take reservations, it will call and have a voice call them, and an AI try and book the reservation for you.”
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Geoffrey Hinton says he joined Google at age 65 after the company acquired his technology.
“I went at age sixty five to work at Google.”
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Geoffrey Hinton describes distillation, which he worked on at Google, as transferring the knowledge of a large neural network into a small one.
“distillation is a way of taking what a big model knows, a big neural net knows, and getting that knowledge into a small neural net.”
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Geoffrey Hinton says his closest moment to a revelation about AI's ability was when Google's PaLM system explained why a joke was funny.
“The closest I had to a eureka moment was when a Google system called Palm was able to say why a joke was funny”
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Geoffrey Hinton says Google held back its large chatbots, possibly to protect its reputation, whereas OpenAI had less to lose by releasing theirs.
“When they had these big chat bots, they didn't release them, possibly because they were worried about their reputation.”
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Google stored its search index by breaking it into 64-megabyte chunks spread across many machines, with a master server tracking where each chunk lived.
“they break the giant index into tons and tons and tons of little chunks, they're called, of individual 64 megabyte files, small files, tractable files.”
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The host says Google's hardware failure rate exceeded 10% per year versus a 3-4% industry average, but replication made the failures tolerable.
“Google's hardware failure was over 10 percent. But the whole system was designed that it didn't matter.”
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Kozyrkov said her first application to Google was for a summer internship, after a Googler gave a talk at her department.
“the application was just for a summer internship, which seemed like a harmless thing to do”
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Kozyrkov said her Google internship title was decision support intern.
“the formal internship name was decision support intern, and I thought to myself, we'll figure out the support and we'll figure out the intern, but decision”
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Kozyrkov described the Google decision support team she interned with as a statistics-focused SWAT team for data-driven decisions, close to Google's primary revenue.
“The team that I was in was is sort of a a SWAT team for data driven decision making. They were very, very close to the revenue, to Google's primary revenue”
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Kozyrkov said that after a weekend in New York she asked a Google recruiter for a role in the New York office instead of Mountain View.
“I called the recruiter and I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, can I get a role in New York City instead?”
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Kozyrkov said she built an early statistical consulting service at Google by persuading statisticians to offer their 20% time to other teams' projects.
“I built early statistical consulting because that wasn't there like you, you couldn't just go ask a statistician who'd sit down with you”
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Jain says enterprise search had a history of failures over two to three decades, including Google's attempts.
“in the two or three decades, two or three decades of enterprise search history, including like products from Google. Like, you know, every time, you know, Google tried to actually build an enterprise search product, it was always, you know, always failed.”
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Jain says Google's culture, where engineers had great autonomy and resources, strongly shaped his management style at Glean.
“Google was a really special company, like it was very different from.”
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David Luan says he later led the large language model effort at Google, which trained a model called PaLM.
“I led the LLM effort at Google, uh, where we trained a model called Palm, which was a, uh, quite strong model for its time.”
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David Luan says Google's Gemini caught up partly by betting on native multimodal training.
“I think that was actually part of how Gemini was able to catch up was that they bet on certain interesting ideas on native multimodal that turned out well for them”
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Arora says Larry Page talked about Google answering a user's intent rather than the literal words typed, and that he also talked about AI.
“He used to talk about getting to a point where you answer my question, answer my intent, as opposed to answer what I type.”
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Arora says advertisers pay more for a completed transaction than for a sales lead, which is why agent-driven transactions could change the search business model.
“People pay a lot more for the consummated transaction than for the lead.”
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According to the hosts, the TPU project was carried out at a Google satellite office in Madison, Wisconsin.
“all of this didn't happen in Mountain View. It was at a Google satellite office in Madison, Wisconsin.”
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The code-then-execute approach was published by Google under the name CaMeL, which has its own dedicated paper.
“this was published by Google, and I think they call it Camel. There is a dedicated paper to that.”
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Ramaswamy says his first Google launch, which was his own work over three months, was covered by the New York Times.
“my first, um, launch at Google, which was entirely my work for three months. One person was covered by the New York Times.”
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Ramaswamy says Google largely stopped at information and did not succeed in expanding into physical-world areas like shopping, airline purchases or hotels.
“Google, for example, stopped at information. God knows I spent enough time trying to get into physical things like shopping or airline purchases or hotels.”
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Ramaswamy says he left Google about seven years before this interview and is now more proud of the work his search ads team did.
“I'm actually more proud of the work that we did in the search ads team now than I was when I left Google.”
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Ramaswamy says PageRank was the insight that powered Google, using the whole internet to determine what was popular.
“The insight that powered Google was PageRank. It was a way of harnessing the power of the entire internet to figure out what was popular and what was not.”
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Dylan Patel estimated Google will make about five to seven million of its own TPU chips.
“They're gonna make something like five to 7 million chips, right, of their own TPUs.”
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Fradin says Google initially resisted third-party measurement, then bought Urchin and built Google Analytics.
“Google, at some point, fought it and then actually bought Urchin and built Google Analytics, right?”
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Fradin says old interviews show Larry Page planning for Google to one day have a million employees.
“You can find old interviews of Larry Page talking about his plan for how Google was gonna have a million employees one day.”
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Walmart does not build its own foundation AI models and instead uses models from providers such as OpenAI and Google.
“We don't build our own foundational models. We make use of the best foundational models that are out there”
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Ramin Mohammadi says the course's MLOps Expo was partnered with Google and scheduled for December 12 at Google's campus in Boston.
“this year, for example, uh, we partnered with Google, uh, so we are hosting on, um, in two weeks, December 12th, at Google Main, Uh campus in Boston”
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Ramin Mohammadi says Google provides cloud credits for his MLOps course every semester so students can build real systems.
“they give us lots of credits for our ML Ops course every semester. Because, uh, our students, they can't otherwise build anything in a real world.”
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The hosts say the house where they recorded was Susan Wojcicki's home, whose garage served as Google's first office.
“Like, literally, Susan Wojcicki lived here. She had, I think, just bought the house. This was her house.”
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Rene Haas says hyperscalers including Google, Microsoft, Meta and AWS are building their own AI chips, with Google's TPUs spanning several generations.
“You'll have hyperscalers doing their own chips, whether that's Google TPUs, and that's gone on for a number of generations, Microsoft, Meta, AWS,”
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Schulhoff describes CaMeL, a framework from Google, as granting an AI agent only the permissions a user's request needs, so a hidden instruction cannot trigger other actions.
“Depending on what the user wants, we might be able to restrict the possible actions of the agent ahead of time so it can't possibly do anything malicious.”
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Bob Saffian said Mastercard has worked with OpenAI, Google and Cloudflare on agentic commerce standards.
“You've been working with OpenAI and Google and Cloudflare on agentic commerce standards.”
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Allan Thygesen says he worked at Google for twelve years before becoming DocuSign's CEO.
“I worked at Google for twelve years before taking this job.”
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Allan Thygesen says Google was a big DocuSign user while he worked there and remains one of DocuSign's largest customers.
“we were a big DocuSign user at at Google, still is, they're one of our largest customers.”
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Don Tapscott names Mark Zuckerberg and Google as examples of parties he does not want to own people's personal AI agents.
“the biggest question for me is who's going to own digital Audi? Mark Zuckerberg? Google?”
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Reid Hoffman says Google used AI to achieve savings of '40' (unit not stated) in its data centers.
“Google, which runs some of the best data centers in the world, when they applied their AI technology, figured out how to get savings of 40 in their data center.”
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Sean Callagy describes Cassie Kozyrkov as Google's chief decision officer while listing notable people the show usually features.
“it's not Cassie Kozyrkov, you know, Google chief decision officer.”
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OpenAI released an Instant Checkout feature, and Microsoft Copilot and Google have comparable agentic commerce offerings.
“OpenAI released instant checkout, Microsoft Copilot has a solution, Google has a solution.”
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Lari Hämäläinen said the performance difference between models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google has halved in the last year.
“if you take an OpenAI model, Anthropic model and Google model, it has halved in the last year”
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Belden says CIOs choosing an AI orchestration layer must now pick among Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft and SAP.
“Well, are you gonna pick Google? Are you gonna pick Anthropic? You're gonna pick Open Ai, you're gonna pick Microsoft, you're gonna pick SAP, right?”
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Craig McLuckie says he and a colleague named Joe built Google Compute Engine, Google's virtual machine infrastructure service.
“I was, uh, happy to meet my friend Joe and we built out, uh, Google Compute Engine, which is, you know, virtual machine infrastructure technology.”
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McLuckie says he and his colleague started the Kubernetes project while at Google and later built other technologies together.
“We started the Kubernetes project, did a few other things, you know, inside there, we, you know, subsequently, we've built a lot of other, uh, technologies together.”
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According to host Nicolai Tangen, Sridhar Ramaswamy spent 15 years at Google, where he grew the advertising business from $1.5 billion to over $100 billion.
“Sridhar spent 15 years at Google, where he built the advertising business from 1.5 billion to over $100 billion.”
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Todd Vancil says cloud computing moved enterprise data to infrastructure providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft and to software-as-a-service providers.
“Whether it be infrastructure as a service from the cloud service providers, the Amazons, the Googles, the Microsofts, whether it's being my data that is now inside of software as a service providers.”
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Baldwin says IBM, along with Google, is among the leading organizations researching quantum computing.
“we're along with, I think, Google, we're probably one of the leading organizations researching quantum in IBM.”
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Sam Ransbotham says the US government put roughly a billion and a half dollars into non-defense AI research spending last year, about what Google spends.
“put like a billion and a half dollars or so into non-defense research spending last year, and that's roughly what Google is putting in”
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Daniel Whitenack says businesses on Google's productivity suite get Gemini built in, while Microsoft shops get Copilot, and neither fits as a full digital workforce.
“if you're primarily using Google Drive and Google Docs, then you're automatically gonna get one of these very opinionated AI integrations across those various apps.”
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Flo Crivello cites a post by Dwarkesh saying Google's CEO Sundar Pichai earns about $150 million a year, as a hint of how much firms might pay for very good agents.
“Sundar at Google is paid $150 million a year, or something like that, you know?”
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Cory Hymel cited a roughly $2 billion Windsurf deal for its top 20 engineers, and Meta paying an AI engineer $3 million a year, as examples of the AI talent war.
“Meta or Google buying Windsurf for 2 billion, only to get their top 20 engineers, or Meta paying AI engineer $3 million a year to come in”
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A2A is Google's agent-to-agent protocol, which lets agents coordinate with and delegate work to other agents.
“A2A is the agent to agent protocol. And this one is really cool in that this is how agents can coordinate with other agents.”
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Jess Hertz says Shopify developed the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open commerce standard, together with Google.
“things like the Universal Commerce Protocol, which is the open commerce standard that we developed with Google, which is really the kind of transaction layer of commerce.”
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Ben Moore says traditional search rankings were largely deterministic except when Google ran a core update.
“unless there was a Google core update, essentially like. The rankings were essentially very deterministic.”
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Liam Dunne says that if he had to pick one channel for search visibility he would choose YouTube because it is a Google-owned search channel.
“I'd bet on YouTube. It's a it's actually a a native search channel, it's owned by Google. I think it's gonna be around for a while.”
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Schmidt says Anthropic's revenue growth was more than twice as fast as Google's record growth during his time as CEO.
“If you look at Anthropic's revenue growth, when I was CEO at Google, we set the revenue growth record. They smashed it more than twice the speed as we did, right?”
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Schmidt says he told people he worked about 63 hours a week at Google, mostly in meetings.
“I used to tell people my job is to sit in meetings 12 hours a day, five days a week, and I work on the weekend too.”
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Schmidt names Google's failure to stay ahead in social media while he was CEO as his biggest professional failure.
“There was a moment when Google had was ahead of everybody else in social media. It was fairly short. And I think, and I take, I was a CEO at the time.”
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Joe Rogan said Robert Epstein's research shows curated Google search results can shift how people perceive a political campaign.
“what he's shown is that they use curated, uh, Google searches to completely shift your perceptive, your perception of a political campaign.”
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Joseph Kim says that when he worked at Google, engineers needed a certification called readability before changing code.
“when I was at Google, you need, you, you need something called readability.”
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