Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Back in 2017, researchers at Google came up with a new way of building AI systems called Transformers. They allowed AI to process language better than ever before.
Chapter 2: How did Google fall behind in the AI race?
It was a breakthrough that would dramatically change the AI landscape. But at the time, Demis Hassibis, the head of Google's AI lab DeepMind, didn't think Transformers were the future of AI.
DeepMind hadn't bet on the LLM approach. You know, Demis didn't really believe that you could get to AGI by, you know, ingesting the internet and figuring out patterns in language. He just didn't believe that that represented human intelligence.
Madhumita Murguia is the FT's AI editor.
It turned out, actually, you know, LLMs were a much better way of sort of mimicking intelligence than he had previously expected.
In 2022, a startup called OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot using transformer technology, and sparked a new AI boom that left Google, DeepMind, and Demis Hassibis playing catch-up.
I heard him talking about this publicly recently. Somebody asked him, you know, how did you feel? It's been your life's work to develop AGI and to kind of lead in this area. And yet, open AI, you know, this little lab came and kind of ate your lunch and they put chat GPT out there. How do you feel about it? And he said, you know, for me, that was war.
They came and parked their tanks on my lawn and I'm going to war.
This is Tectonic from the Financial Times. I'm Murad Ahmed, the FT's technology news editor. A handful of Silicon Valley companies are vying to lead the world in artificial intelligence. In the last few years, startups like OpenAI and Anthropic have surged ahead with sophisticated chatbots and advanced coding models. But now there's a feeling in the valley that Google is back in a big way.
It has the money, the scale, and the talent.
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Chapter 3: What breakthroughs has DeepMind achieved in AI?
So is Google destined to win the AI race? To find out if Google is really on the AI combat trail, I spoke to Madameita Murgia, who's followed the career of Demis Hassibis for the best part of a decade, and to Stephen Morris, the FT's bureau chief in San Francisco, who covers, amongst other things, Google.
Okay, guys, so I want the bull and the bear case for why Google and DeepMind are going to win the AI race. Stephen, give me the bull case.
Well, when I first arrived here in San Francisco a couple of years ago, the narrative around Google and AI was very negative. You know, there was widespread allegations they'd fumbled their early lead in this technology, allowed two now trillion, potential trillion dollar startups heading for IPO to eat their own lunch after taking their staff and technology they'd incubated.
But over the last, I would say, 12 to 18 months, that has turned around and Google really has started to show its strengths and started to back up their rhetoric that they have been building towards this AI moment for the last decade plus. What we are seeing is both a resurgence in their actual technical capabilities, powered by their DeepMind Research Lab.
Gemini, which is the name of their chatbot and their larger family of models, is starting to be adopted by both consumers and pushed to enterprises more aggressively. But more than that, Google has this whole ecosystem around the actual models, which they say gives them both a cost advantage and a technology advantage. I'm thinking here of their giant cloud business.
I'm talking about their custom TPUs, which are specialized AI chips. And then you have this vast reservoir of money that they are sitting on, which they're able to pump and recycle into AI. I use that in the widest possible sense for attracting and retaining talent. for building more data centers, powering research.
So we are really seeing Google completely change the narrative and like really underline their credentials. And I think every aspect of AI here. Now that doesn't mean we shouldn't criticize them for being a bit slow to start and allowing anthropic and open AI to grow into these massive competitors right under their noses.
But if I'm going to gamble like long-term, who's still going to be there at the frontier, monetizing AI, making the best technology, my money's probably going to be on Google.
Okay. This is a rhetorical exercise, Madhu, but I want you to engage in it. What's the bear case here?
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Chapter 4: What challenges does Google face in regaining its AI leadership?
The fact that they also invented the transformer back in 2017, which is the technology at the heart of this entire revolution that we're seeing, these large language models. But they've lost every single person of the seven co-authors who wrote that paper to other companies, including OpenAI and elsewhere.
And now we're at a point where there's an entirely new market that's been created by these upstart competitors. You've got Anthropic and OpenAI who've opened up entirely new applications. And I think the bare case there is, you know, so far they've shown that they've sort of incubated talent and then lost all of that talent to build these new companies.
Right, and these companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as taking AI talent from Google, they're able to be more nimble in a way that's harder for a tech giant like Google to do.
But what Google also has in its favor is that its rivals are, in addition to being nimble and able to pivot, they are also unique and often bonkers organizations.
For example, the CEO of Anthropic picking a fight with Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the appropriate military use of their technology, resulting in them being thrown into a tailspin after essentially being banned from all US government servers.
And good for their reputation in some ways.
Good for their reputation in some ways, in particular among very worthy, very moral AI researchers. Bad for their income. And of course, you never really want to make an enemy of Donald Trump in this current environment. Equally, you have OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman being absolutely massacred in court today.
in a lawsuit with Elon Musk at the moment, accusing them of essentially stealing the assets and the IP of a charity, which could derail their for-profit conversion. Remember, they were initially founded as a non-profit to develop AGI for the benefit of all humanity. They're now an $852 billion company with lots of outside investors very keen to see them IPO this year.
Google, compared to those two situations, is a relative oasis of calm.
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Chapter 5: What is the bull case for Google's return in the AI sector?
Yeah, it's coming out a bit more lately.
They're like, look at what the companies that are run by like real AI researchers and scientists are doing. And then look at what the companies who are run by marketing guys or advertising people are doing. They said this on stage when they appeared together at Davos in January. Very thinly veiled jive at Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg there.
And their point is, I guess potentially Elon Musk as well, their point was that we are the ones that can be trusted to deploy AI safely. to really deeply think about what an AGI future looks like, from everything from the economy, employment, to safety and military applications.
Whereas if you were just using AI to improve your advertising margins, or indeed line your own pockets, perhaps you can't be trusted as much for the technology.
Yeah, and this is a strongly held belief by Demis. When asked, why did you do... a PhD in neuroscience and go into video games and play chess and all of these things. He has said he needed his credentials to be unimpeachable when he came to running a company like DeepMind. And what he meant was that he wanted to surround himself with PhDs
and for them to know that he probably was the smartest guy in the room and that he could talk to them at that level as well as running the company. I think we've given a lot of airtime to the Bull case. I am going to insist that we be good, sceptical journalists and also really talk through the Bear case as well.
I have a Bear case for you, Murad. Please, Stephen. You said Kremes' credentials were unimpeachable or impeccable.
I think he said that he needed his credentials to be unimpeachable.
you know, the culture, certainly DeepMind has always been very aligned to this don't be evil initial ethos. Now Google's obviously, Alphabet's abandoned that and it's organized the world's information to make it useful or something, which is a much more commercial strap line. There has been a bit of a spat as we,
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