3 ms·

Do you have any sources for this? If he knew it was going to be this huge, why were they looking for an acquisition for north of a million dollars? On AGI: are

Do you have any sources for this? If he knew it was going to be this huge, why were they looking for an acquisition for north of a million dollars? On AGI: are you referencing this clip? [1] To me, it seems like an ordinary vision when you stretch your imagination. He didn't have any realistic idea how Google might achieve AGI, just something that could happen in the future. And this was in 2000. Google, I imagine, was pretty successful by then. Larry Page's original ambition was to digitize books and knowledge in the world [2]. > Page had always wanted to digitize books. Way back in 1996, the student project that eventually became Google—a “crawler” that would ingest documents and rank them for relevance against a user’s query—was actually conceived as part of an effort “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library.” [1]: https://twitter.com/jam3scampbell/status/1608270969763729415 https://twitter.com/jam3scampbell/status/1608270969763729415 [2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...

dekhn 3y ago
my source is larry himself- I used to work there and volunteered at SciFoo, which he attended and I chatted with him about it. The digital library is basically building a corpus for training AGI. His dad was a computer scientist and larry read a lot of AGI sci fi as a kid, so it's not really that hard to extrapolate 1980s technology to 2040s outcomes.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  It's only in hindsight that training with a huge corpus of text is going to give AGI. (Still not obvious if you ask me.)
  - dekhn 3y ago
    I'm the same age as Larry and started working in machine learning in the early 90s, and to me, it seemed pretty obvious at the time that AGI would ultimately need a large corpus of text (and video) to be useful. What's kind of funny is the models I worked with at the time- hidden markov models of (biological) text anticipated the validity of this approach, although by design, they don't work with long contexts.
- awesomeMilou 3y ago
  His dad wasn't "just" a computer scientist, he was a professor for computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State. Sergey Brin's father was equally a professor in mathematics at the University of Maryland. > It's obvious in retrospect that this was a great idea for a startup. It wasn't obvious at the time. It may not have been obvious, but the decision was damn well near as engineered with data as it could be. They also were _insanely_ well connected through their and their parents academic career. Both Sergey and Larry had obtained their PhD prior to starting the company. I can also remember reading that they obtained significant amounts of funding through connections Larry's dad had into the industry. You can ignore the rest of my comment, what follows is just my take. Their success story is imo one of the most blatant examples on how privilege really does give you a boost in life. I am not arguing that anyone could have done it, but I do wonder how the world would look like if we were all kids of academics with a successful career, with a relatively safe, secure and stable childhood home and a family background that really incentivizes learning and academic success over succumbing to the pressure of, you know, having an income at some point.
  - dekhn 3y ago
    I don't think larry or sergey got their phd - larry got a masters and I think sergey left before he got any degree. Don't forget that Larry's older brother Carl went through the whole VC process with egroups and gained extreme experience with how to maximize his position in negotiation. But yes, I agree completely that kids of academics raised in an environment that incentivzes learning is a reliable way to transform the future.
    - awesomeMilou 3y ago
      So to correct my original statement: Both have a masters degree and both were pursuing PhD's before they focused on Google. But I consider them more than halfway there, afaik both have published papers separate from the paper that eventually lead to Google. This is taken from their own testimonials from their paper [0] The rest of my statement is true. [0] http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf
    - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nostrademons 3y ago
Also worked at Google in the 00s, and have spoken personally with several people who worked on Google when it was still a Stanford grad project. To hear Larry tell it, his original idea for Google was to download the whole web and throw away everything but the links, and he was inspired by academic notions of citation indexes. It wasn’t specifically (or really at all, until Google books came out) about books - that sounds like a cover story to get grad student funding for his actual idea, because you can’t really go to a university and say “I want to download the whole web and throw away everything but the links” without telling them why or connecting it to some plausibly useful idea. The acquisition offer is often cited, but I don’t think Larry and Sergey were ever really serious about taking it. They didn’t, after all. But if you’re living on a grad student stipend (which was like $20k in the 90s), a million bucks is a lot of money. And they absolutely knew it would be big, they just didn’t know how it would be big. It was quite popular within the Stanford lab as well…it’s interesting, looking through the early CVS commits for Google, how much work was done by people who ended up not actually becoming employees of Google or having a major part in its story. I think the real genius of Google was treating the web as an object that could be studied and manipulated, and not as some amorphous thing you were part of. That was exciting even if people didn’t know how it would be.
inerte 3y ago
In the “Measure What Matters” book the author talks about investing in Google in early 1999, and the founders were indeed projecting billions of dollars in revenue, using ads.
lupire 3y ago
Digitizing all the books in he world was an is an essential component of modern AI, a full two decades later. I don't know what point you are trying to make. Googles mission was always to know everything for everyone.

dekhn 3y ago

my source is larry himself- I used to work there and volunteered at SciFoo, which he attended and I chatted with him about it. The digital library is basically building a corpus for training AGI. His dad was a computer scientist and larry read a lot of AGI sci fi as a kid, so it's not really that hard to extrapolate 1980s technology to 2040s outcomes.

actionfromafar 3y ago
It's only in hindsight that training with a huge corpus of text is going to give AGI. (Still not obvious if you ask me.)
- dekhn 3y ago
  I'm the same age as Larry and started working in machine learning in the early 90s, and to me, it seemed pretty obvious at the time that AGI would ultimately need a large corpus of text (and video) to be useful. What's kind of funny is the models I worked with at the time- hidden markov models of (biological) text anticipated the validity of this approach, although by design, they don't work with long contexts.
awesomeMilou 3y ago
His dad wasn't "just" a computer scientist, he was a professor for computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State. Sergey Brin's father was equally a professor in mathematics at the University of Maryland. > It's obvious in retrospect that this was a great idea for a startup. It wasn't obvious at the time. It may not have been obvious, but the decision was damn well near as engineered with data as it could be. They also were _insanely_ well connected through their and their parents academic career. Both Sergey and Larry had obtained their PhD prior to starting the company. I can also remember reading that they obtained significant amounts of funding through connections Larry's dad had into the industry. You can ignore the rest of my comment, what follows is just my take. Their success story is imo one of the most blatant examples on how privilege really does give you a boost in life. I am not arguing that anyone could have done it, but I do wonder how the world would look like if we were all kids of academics with a successful career, with a relatively safe, secure and stable childhood home and a family background that really incentivizes learning and academic success over succumbing to the pressure of, you know, having an income at some point.
- dekhn 3y ago
  I don't think larry or sergey got their phd - larry got a masters and I think sergey left before he got any degree. Don't forget that Larry's older brother Carl went through the whole VC process with egroups and gained extreme experience with how to maximize his position in negotiation. But yes, I agree completely that kids of academics raised in an environment that incentivzes learning is a reliable way to transform the future.
  - awesomeMilou 3y ago
    So to correct my original statement: Both have a masters degree and both were pursuing PhD's before they focused on Google. But I consider them more than halfway there, afaik both have published papers separate from the paper that eventually lead to Google. This is taken from their own testimonials from their paper [0] The rest of my statement is true. [0] http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf
  - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nostrademons 3y ago

Also worked at Google in the 00s, and have spoken personally with several people who worked on Google when it was still a Stanford grad project. To hear Larry tell it, his original idea for Google was to download the whole web and throw away everything but the links, and he was inspired by academic notions of citation indexes. It wasn’t specifically (or really at all, until Google books came out) about books - that sounds like a cover story to get grad student funding for his actual idea, because you can’t really go to a university and say “I want to download the whole web and throw away everything but the links” without telling them why or connecting it to some plausibly useful idea. The acquisition offer is often cited, but I don’t think Larry and Sergey were ever really serious about taking it. They didn’t, after all. But if you’re living on a grad student stipend (which was like $20k in the 90s), a million bucks is a lot of money. And they absolutely knew it would be big, they just didn’t know how it would be big. It was quite popular within the Stanford lab as well…it’s interesting, looking through the early CVS commits for Google, how much work was done by people who ended up not actually becoming employees of Google or having a major part in its story. I think the real genius of Google was treating the web as an object that could be studied and manipulated, and not as some amorphous thing you were part of. That was exciting even if people didn’t know how it would be.

inerte 3y ago

In the “Measure What Matters” book the author talks about investing in Google in early 1999, and the founders were indeed projecting billions of dollars in revenue, using ads.

lupire 3y ago

Digitizing all the books in he world was an is an essential component of modern AI, a full two decades later. I don't know what point you are trying to make. Googles mission was always to know everything for everyone.