Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) co-founder Larry Page called artificial intelligence "the ultimate version of Google" back in 2000, a prediction the company now treats as marching orders.
What Happened: In that 2000 interview at the International Achievement Summit, Page explained his vision of AI for Google as “the ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the Web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing.”
In the very next sentence, Page conceded that Google was "nowhere near" that goal, even with 6,000 servers and an index "70 miles high."
Page framed the challenge as an engineering puzzle that would require a marriage of unprecedented computing power with an ocean of public data.
Google engineers cracked a key piece in 2017 with the "Attention Is All You Need" paper, unveiling the transformer architecture that underpins today's large-language models. The design lets models read entire sentences at once, turbo-charging accuracy and spawning chatbots able to draft text and field open-ended questions.
Alphabet’s current CEO, Sundar Pichai, emphasized Google’s transition to being “AI-first” in 2016, but Page's 25-year-old roadmap shows the ambition ran deeper.
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