The AI revolution has only now become mainstream, and has changed how people work and play, but some people in tech had seen it coming a mile away.
Google CEO Larry page had predicted that AI would be the “ultimate version” of Google all the way back in 2000. “Artificial Intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google,” he had said in an interview back then. “So if we had the ultimate search engine, it would understand everything on the web. It would understand know exactly what you wanted and it would give you the right thing. And that’s artificial intelligence — it would be able to answer any question basically, cause almost everything is on the web, right?” he had said.
“We’re nowhere near doing that now,” Page had admitted. “However we can get incrementally closer to that, and that’s basically what we work on. That’s tremendously interesting from an intellectual standpoint, right? We have all this data. If you printed out our index, it would be 70 miles high. We have all this computation. We have about 6,000 computers, so we have a lot of resources — we have enough to space to store like a hundred copies of the whole web. So you have a really interesting sort of confluence of a lot of different things, right? A lot of computation, a lot of data that didn’t use to be available. And from an engineering scientific standpoint, building things make use of this is really interesting intellectual exercise,” he had added.
Page’s words were prescient in more ways than one. It turns out that the confluence of data and computation did work — in 2017, Google’s engineers wrote the “Attention is all that you need paper” which invented the transformer architecture, which enabled the building of Large Language Models. These Large Language Models, exactly like Page had predicted, are able to answer any question that the user wants. Google’s search product has integrated them as well — Google’s AI overviews now perform essentially the same function, directly answering any questions that users have. Current Google CEO Sundar Pichai had recently said that the Google founders had spoken of AI 10-15 years ago, and it now turns out that they’d been mapping out exactly how the AI revolution would play out as long as 25 years prior. The AI revolution appears to have hit the world all of a sudden, but what’s actually happened is that a group of scientists and technologist had been assiduously working towards it for decades.