Google Co-Founder Larry Page Predicted A Machine That Would ‘Understand Everything On The Web,’ Has That 25-Year Old Pipe Dream Finally Turned Into Reality? – Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)
Alphabet Inc. GOOGL 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.
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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.
Why It Matters: Fast-forward to 2024, Google has rolled out AI Overviews which are brief answers generated by its Gemini model that sit atop traditional links and aim to “do the searching for you.” The feature already drives material revenue, Alphabet executives told investors, even as publishers like Chegg sue over content reuse.
Meanwhile, a report from earlier in the year suggests Larry Page is likely building a new AI-backed startup called Dynatomics, an enterprise focused on improving manufacturing processes. The Google co-founder currently has a net worth of $153 billion, making him the seventh wealthiest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Page still holds on to a considerable amount of Alphabet shares, amounting to approximately 6% of Alphabet.
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Read next: Apple May See Fewer Searches In Safari, But Google CEO Sundar Pichai Insists AI Is Fueling Overall Query Growth: ‘Far From A Zero-Sum Game’
