Google's AI Aspirations

Google was envisioned as an AI company from its inception, with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin focusing on creating large compute clusters to leverage machine learning on the vast data they collected. The mission statement reflects this ambition, emphasizing the goal of gathering the world's information to make it universally useful, effectively feeding it into a giant AI supercomputer. Despite this foundational approach, the internal discussions around AI's future were not intensely pursued, as practical applications like search optimization took precedence. A significant part of Google's initial success stemmed from early advancements like the spelling correction feature, which showcased AI's potential in solving everyday problems.