Google On The Brain!
Fast Company|October 2019
Google has more computing power, data, and talent to pursue artificial intelligence than any other company on earth and it's not slowing down. That's why human can't either.
Katrina Brooker
Google On The Brain!

The human brain is a funny thing. Certain memories canstick with us forever: the birth of a child, a car crash, an election day. But we only store some details—the color of the hospital delivery room or the smell of the polling station—while others fade, such as the face of the nurse when that child was born, or what we were wearing during that accident. For Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the day he watched is one he’ll remember forever.

“This was 2012, in a room with a small team, and there were just a few of us,” he tells me. An engineer named Jeff Dean, a legendary programmer at Google who helped build its search engine, had been working on a new project and wanted Pichai to have a look. “Anytime Jeff wants to update you on something, you just get excited by it,” he says.

Pichai doesn’t recall exactly which building he was in when Dean presented his work, though odd details of that day have stuck with him. He remembers standing, rather than sitting, and someone joking about an HR snafu that had designated the newly hired Geoffrey Hinton—the “Father of Deep Learning,” an AI researcher for four decades, and, later, a Turing Award winner—as an intern.

The future CEO of Google was an SVP at the time, running Chrome and Apps, and he hadn’t been thinking about AI. No one at Google was, really, not in a significant way. Yes, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had stated publicly 12 years prior that artificial intelligence would transform the company: “The ideal search engine is smart,” Page told Online magazine in May 2000. “It has to understand your query, and it has to understand all the documents, and that’s clearly AI.” But at Google and elsewhere, machine learning had been delivering meager results for decades, despite grand promises.

This story is from the October 2019 edition of Fast Company.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.

This story is from the October 2019 edition of Fast Company.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.

MORE STORIES FROM FAST COMPANYView All
Orange Crush
Fast Company

Orange Crush

Y Combinator was designed to be a supercondensed version of Silicon Valley. Now that it's at full potency, can it maintain its outsider pose while being the ultimate insiders' network?

time-read
10+ mins  |
March - April 2024
10 TREND
Fast Company

10 TREND

FROM THE MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES | PLUS 606 HONOREES FROM ADVERTISING TO VIDEO

time-read
10+ mins  |
March - April 2024
THE WORLD'S 50 MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES
Fast Company

THE WORLD'S 50 MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES

THE 1920S, WATER WENT INTO A GENERATOR, AND DC POWER CAME OUT. NOW ELECTRONS GO INTO A GENERATOR, AND INTELLIGENCE COMES OUT.\"

time-read
10+ mins  |
March - April 2024
Reimagining the ways we work and meet
Fast Company

Reimagining the ways we work and meet

AS BUSINESS LEADERS RETHINK THEIR REAL ESTATE FOOTPRINT, THEY'RE EMBRACING SMALLER, HIGH-QUALITY, AMENITY-RICH SPACES THAT ARE MORE FOCUSED ON HUMAN CONNECTION.” IN OTHER WORDS, CONVENE.

time-read
2 mins  |
March - April 2024
Hollywood
Fast Company

Hollywood

AI is going to transform Hollywood But it won't be the horror story everyone's afraid of.

time-read
7 mins  |
Winter 2023-2024
Chick-Fil-A's New Testament
Fast Company

Chick-Fil-A's New Testament

Boycotted for years by liberals - and now by conservatives, too - a christian-driven brand is trying to walk the narrow path toward growth. What happens next could be enlightening for businesses everywhere.

time-read
10+ mins  |
Winter 2023-2024
The Office You Want
Fast Company

The Office You Want

Business leaders want workers back. Workers are loath to resume their commutes. We asked five leading design firms to create plans that might make leaving home seem worthwhile.

time-read
8 mins  |
Winter 2023-2024
Fan With a Plan
Fast Company

Fan With a Plan

Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin parlayed a ski shop in suburban Philly into a $31 billion sports apparel juggernaut. Now, he's adding trading cards, gambling, live events, and more.

time-read
10+ mins  |
Winter 2023-2024
The Helpful Hardware Man
Fast Company

The Helpful Hardware Man

Marques Brownlee has rewired the way people shop for gadgets-and how companies sell them. Inside the humble factory with the power to shape the $1 trillion consumer electronics industry.

time-read
10+ mins  |
Winter 2023-2024
PIZZA, ROBOTS, and MONEY
Fast Company

PIZZA, ROBOTS, and MONEY

THE ZESTY TALE OF ONE OF THE BIGGEST FLOPS IN SILICON VALLEY HISTORY

time-read
10+ mins  |
Winter 2023-2024