Evidence receipt / evaluation
Published · transcript-backedDavid Rosenthal: evaluation
6 Oct 2025 Acquired Google Part III: The AI Company
“This is a small little passage in Stephen Levy’s great book that’s been a source for all of our Google episodes, In the Plex. This is a small little throwaway passage in here about this because this book came out before ChatGPT and AI and all that.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- David Rosenthal
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 6 Oct 2025
- Publisher
- Acquired
- Episode
- Google Part III: The AI Company
Transcript context
…Where did you find this, by the way? A 25-year-old… This is In the Plex. This is a small little passage in Stephen Levy’s great book that’s been a source for all of our Google episodes, In the Plex. This is a small little throwaway passage in here about this because this book came out before ChatGPT and AI and all that. So Noam latches onto George, and keeps vibing over this idea. Over the next couple of months, the two of them decide, in the most Google-y fashion possible, that they are just going to stop working on everything else, and they’re going to go work on this idea on language models and compressing data and can they generate machine understanding with data. And if they can do that, that that would be good for Google. I think this coincides with that period in 2001 when Larry Page fired all the managers in the engineering organization. Everybody was just doing whatever they wanted to do. Funny.…
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