I have a theory that Google was terrified of this very thing happening a few years back. Kinda out there but hear me out. Based on what I've heard from leaks a

I have a theory that Google was terrified of this very thing happening a few years back. Kinda out there but hear me out. Based on what I've heard from leaks and various news articles, the leadership of the search division was once adamantly against using neural networks for search. Things took a sudden turn maybe 5 years ago. Something caused google to do a complete 180 and vastly increase their investment in AI research. They saw something that scared them. I think it was their unexpected success using AI for machine translation. There was much PR about it at the time, and I think it really got the gears turning at Google HQ. You see, the same language processing needed for machine translation has obvious parallels to search. The more curious employees began applying word vectors used for translation to search. After all, most of it had been trained on index data from multi lingual websites anyways. They found that, horrifically, rather simple neural networks sometimes outperformed the the search algorithms google had spent billions on. When this reached upper management it set off a quiet panic. Google, once seen as invincible, could have been beaten by a start-up using effective ML techniques. Computer power calculations showed that this could have been done since a few years after the debut of CUDA, a window of vulnerability of maybe 7 years. The timeframe of around 2005-2010 coincided with Google spinning off a bunch of moonshot projects and doubling down on their core businesses. Coincidence? Maybe, but I don't think so. I wish a Xoogler or two would come out of the woodwork and tell me if I'm crazy or not. Anyways, Google usually has a 5-7 year lag time when they release details of their tech to the public. This dates Tensorflow and their heavy AI work to around 2010. The window where somebody could have beat them easily with ML was probably 2005-2010