Acquired Google: The AI Company
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Oct 6, 2025 Google, the pioneer of transformer technology, finds itself grappling with the surprising rise of startups like OpenAI. The journey traces Google's early AI efforts, the creation of groundbreaking models, and the talent exodus that fueled competitors. With the launch of ChatGPT, the company faced a 'code red' and struggled to keep pace. Meanwhile, Waymo evolved from a bold concept to a commercial success. As Google seeks to merge Brain and DeepMind into Gemini, it confronts the challenge of innovating while safeguarding its lucrative search business.
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Google's Innovator's Dilemma
- Google faces a classic innovator's dilemma: new AI products can be better but far less profitable than legacy Search.
- The company must choose between protecting $140B annual profit from Search or disrupting itself with AI.
Lunch Idea Became Phil And Ads
- Georges Hinton and Noam Shazir started a language-model project over lunch and dropped other work to pursue it.
- Their probabilistic model 'Phil' later powered Did You Mean and AdSense features at Google.
Engineering Scaled Research To Product
- Jeff Dean parallelized a 12-hour translation model into a 100 millisecond production system.
- Engineering and distributed infrastructure turned research breakthroughs into massive product wins at Google.
