Google Part III: The AI Company
Acquired
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
4.7 • 5.2K Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2025
⏱️ 247 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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:
- Anthropic: https://bit.ly/acquiredclaude25
- Sentry: https://bit.ly/acquiredsentry
- WorkOS: https://acquired.fm/unplugged
- Playing Cards: https://bit.ly/workOSshop (Code: ACQDECK)
- Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26
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
- Subscribe to ACQ2
- Merch Store!
© Copyright 2015-2026 ACQ, LLC
Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I went and looked at a studio, well, a little office that I was going to turn into a studio nearby, but it was not good at all. It had dropped ceiling so I could hear the guy in the office next to me. You would be able to hear him talking on episodes. Third co-host. Third co-host. Is it Howard? No, it was like a lawyer. It seemed to be like talking through some horrible problem that I didn't want to listen to, but I could hear every word. |
| 0:22.6 | Does he want millions of people listening to this conversation? |
| 0:25.9 | Right. |
| 0:27.7 | All right. |
| 0:28.6 | All right. Let's do a podcast. |
| 0:30.6 | Let's do a podcast. |
| 0:31.2 | Who got the truth? |
| 0:35.2 | Is it you? Is it you? Is it you, is it you who got the truth now? |
| 0:40.2 | Is it you, is it you? |
| 0:42.3 | Sit me down, say it straight. |
| 0:45.2 | Another story on the way who got the truth. |
| 0:49.1 | Welcome to the fall 2025 season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks |
| 0:55.3 | behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts. Here's a dilemma. |
| 1:01.7 | Imagine you have a profitable business. You make giant margins on every single unit you sell. |
| 1:08.1 | And the market you compete in is also giant, one of the largest in the world, |
| 1:12.6 | you might say. But then on top of that, lucky for you, you also are a monopoly in that giant |
| 1:19.3 | market with 90% share and a lot of lock-in. And when you say monopoly, monopoly as defined by the |
| 1:26.5 | U.S. government. |
| 1:45.0 | That is correct. But then, imagine this. In your research lab, your brilliant scientists come up with an invention. This particular invention, when combined with a whole bunch of your old inventions by all your other brilliant scientists, turns out to create the product that is much better for most purposes than your current product. So you launched the new product based on this new invention, |
| 1:50.6 | right? Right. I mean, especially because out of pure benevolence, your scientists had published |
| 1:56.8 | research papers about how awesome the new invention is, and lots of the inventions |
| 2:01.0 | before also. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.