Forget the sex, Google’s quest for AI is its main goal
Co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page see their mission as building a gigantic AI learning machine rather than using it to improve their search
An upcoming book is getting some media attention for including an unflattering characterisation of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. But there’s a lot more to the story.
Some original Google employees remember Brin as a “playboy” during the company’s early days, as well as a manager who thought nothing of having intimate relationships with female employees, according to Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (as Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher.
Those competing with Brin shouldn't stop reading there though. In addition to the salacious information, excerpts of the book published by Vanity Fair include a sobering reminder about what Brin and the company’s other founder Larry Page, always considered their primary goal.
In Fisher’s book, Kevin Kelly, Wired’s founding editor, told him, “When I met Page, I said, ‘Larry, I don’t get it. What’s the future of search for free? I don’t see where you’re going with this.’ And Larry said, ‘We are not really interested in search. We are making an [artificial intelligence].’ So from the very beginning, the mission for Google was not to use AI to make their search better, but to use search to make an AI.”
Author Steven Levy wrote something similar in his 2011 book about Google, In the Plex.
“From the very start, its founders saw Google as a vehicle to realise the dream of artificial intelligence in augmenting humanity. A bedrock principle of Google was serving its users – but a goal was building a giant artificial intelligence learning machine.”
What this suggests – almost defying belief – is that Google search and the colossal wealth and changes it unleashed were just a prelude, a means to arrive at an AI future. We’ve heard about Page and Brin’s lofty goals before, the elevator to the moon and flying cars and whatnot. But this AI thing? Look around. It’s happening.