Google Part III: The AI Company
From Acquired by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
October 6, 2025 · 4h 4m · Season 18 · Episode 1
About this episode
The episode explores Google's 20+ year journey in AI and its challenges following the launch of ChatGPT.
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…
Topics covered
- AI
- business strategy
- innovation
- technology
Keywords
- Transformer
- ChatGPT
- Google Brain
- Waymo
- DeepMind
Mentioned in this episode
Products: Transformer, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, ACQ2, TPUs, Waymo
Books & works: Sea of Stars
Places: San Francisco
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