Google Part III: The AI Company

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 Google. This is the story of how the world's greatest business faces its greatest test: can they disrupt themselves without losing their $140B annual profit-generating machine in Search? Sponsors: Sentry: WorkOS: Anthropic: Statsig: Links: Sign up for email updates and vote on future episodes! Geoff Hinton’s 2007 Tech Talk at Google Our recent ACQ2 episode with Tobi Lutke Worldly Partners’ Multi-Decade Alphabet Study In the Plex Supremecy Genius Makers All episode sources Carve Outs: We’re hosting the Super Bowl Innovation Summit! F1: The Movie Travelpro suitcases Glue Guys Podcast Sea of Stars Stepchange Podcast More Acquired! Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodes Join the Slack

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Google Part III: The AI Company is an episode from Acquired by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal.

This episode is 244:23 long.

This episode was published on Oct 6, 2025.

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