Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, admitted that Google “for sure messed up” by underinvesting in AI and failing to seriously pursue the opportunity after releasing the research that led to today’s generative AI era.
Google was scared. Google didn’t take it seriously enough and failed to scale fast enough after the Transformer paper, Brin said. Also:
- Google was “too scared to bring it to people” because chatbots can “say dumb things.”
- “OpenAI ran with it,” which was “a super smart insight.”
The full quote. Brin said:
- “I guess I would say in some ways we for sure messed up in that we underinvested and sort of didn’t take it as seriously as we should have, say eight years ago when we published the transformer paper. We actually didn’t take it all that seriously and didn’t necessarily invest in scaling the compute. And also we were too scared to bring it to people because chatbots say dumb things. And you know, OpenAI ran with it, which good for them. It was a super smart insight and it was also our people like Ilya [Sutskever] who went there to do that. But I do think we still have benefited from that long history.”
Yes, but. Google still benefits from years of AI research and control over much of the technology that powers it, Brin said. That includes deep learning algorithms, years of neural network research and development, data-center capacity, and semiconductors.
Why we care. Brin’s comments help explain why Google’s AI-driven search changes have felt abrupt and inconsistent. After years of hesitation about shipping imperfect AI, Google is now moving fast (perhaps too fast?). The volatility we see in Google Search is collateral damage from that catch-up mode.
Where is AI going? Brin framed today’s AI race as hyper-competitive and fast-moving: “If you skip AI news for a month, you’re way behind.” When asked where AI is going, he said:
- “I think we just don’t know. Is there a ceiling to intelligence? I guess in addition to the question that you raised, can it do anything a person can do? There’s the question, what things can it do that a person cannot do? That’s sort of a super intelligence question. And I think that’s just not known, how smart can a thing be?”
One more thing. Brin said he often uses Gemini Live in the car for back-and-forth conversations. The public version runs on an “ancient model,” Brin said, adding that a “way better version” is coming in a few weeks.
The video. Brin’s remarks came at a Stanford event marking the School of Engineering’s 100th anniversary. He discussed Google’s origins, its innovation culture, and the current AI landscape. Here’s the full video.
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