Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
56 published records
01 / recommendation
“Scoping just to ride share now that we have Waymo in San Francisco, I use Waymo in scenarios where I would never use an Uber or a Lyft.”
02 / recommendation
“I find switching costs to be relatively low. I use Gemini for some stuff, then it’s really easy to switch away.”
03 / belief
“I think if that had happened, DeepMind would not have gone down in the same way, and probably OpenAI would not have gotten founded.”
04 / belief
“I think the only other bear case I would add is that they have the added challenge now of being the incumbent this time around, and people and the ecosystem isn’t necessarily rooting for them in the way that people were rooting for Google when they were a startup, and in the way that people were still rooting for Google in the mobile transition.”
05 / belief
“If we’re going to do one, we should probably launch it before they launch theirs. I think that had something to do with the timing.”
06 / belief
“I think within a year it might happen. There are rumors already that some neoclouds in the coming months are going to have TPUs.”
07 / observation
“We got to rewind back all the way to 2004, the DARPA Grand Challenge, which was created as a way to spur research into autonomous ground robots for military use.”
08 / belief
“I think Larry and Sergey were like, hmm, if we’re going to compete seriously, we need Noam back and blank check to go get him.”
09 / belief
“People (I think) are starting to realize Google’s slow. They’re slow to react to things.”
10 / belief
“Google is trying to have all four of those. There is no other company that has (I think) more than one.”
11 / belief
“There’s a rental car company in Texas that manages it. Or they’ve partnered (I believe) with Lyft and Uber.”
12 / belief
“I think if you look at all the big tech companies, Google, as unlikely as it seems given how things started, is probably doing the best job of trying to thread the needle with AI right now.”
13 / belief
“I think that’s viable. But again, I would say as a regular user of the product, it is a different and expanding product to human ride share.”
14 / belief
“I think that’s the right call. Think about the big AI players. NVIDIA has a cloud, but not really.”
15 / belief
“Normally we would do this on the business all up. I think for this episode we should try to scope it to AI products.”
16 / commitment
“We could do a whole episode about this journey, but we will just hit some of the major points for the sake of time.”
17 / uncertainty
“I do know that a bunch of folks on the NotebookLM team are Acquired fans. I don’t know if they trained on us.”
18 / belief
“I haven’t been to the movie theater since the Eras tour, which I think is just more about the current state of my family life with two young children.”
19 / commitment
“We plan to extend the Transformer to problems involving input and output modalities other than text, and to investigate large inputs and outputs such as images, audio, and video.”
20 / belief
“I think at the time that negotiations were taking place between Elon and Larry and Google, this was in the depths of the Model S production scaling woes.”
21 / observation
“If you’re not a finance person, the way to read into that is yes, we still need a lot of cash for investing in the future of AI and data centers, but we still actually had way more cash than we needed and we decided to distribute that to shareholders.”
22 / belief
“I think I might actually, pretty soon, her birthday’s coming up, end up getting a Switch so that we can play together on the Switch.”
23 / observation
“The only way that external companies—users, developers, model researchers—could use TPUs would be if Google had a cloud to deliver them.”
24 / commitment
“Most of you, we can’t fit millions of people in a tidy auditorium in San Francisco the week of the Super Bowl when every other venue has tons of stuff too, so there’ll be an opportunity to watch that streaming online. And as we get closer to that date in February, we will make sure that you all know a way that you can tune in and watch the MC-ing, interviewing, and festivities at hand, Super Bowl week.”
25 / uncertainty
“I don’t know, but at steady state it probably will be something like 25%, maybe up to 50%.”
26 / belief
“All right, well with that, let’s move into analysis. I think we need to do bull and bear on this one.”
27 / prediction
“The switching costs have not really come out yet in AI products, although I expect they will.”
28 / commitment
“We are going to do a open Zoom call, an LP call just like the days of yore with anyone.”
29 / belief
“I think probably some people, probably almost certainly at Google were thinking, oh, we can create narrow intelligence that’ll be better than humans at certain tasks.”
30 / belief
“The Singularity Summit, organized by Ray Kurzweil—a future Google employee (I think), Chief Futurist, noted futurist—Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Peter Thiel.”
31 / belief
“I wonder if they did talk to AWS at all about it. Because I think—this is a crazy Easter egg; I hesitate to say it out loud—AWS was actually in the very first investment with Elon in OpenAI.”
32 / belief
“I think that did meaningfully move the needle, even though Google wasn’t bragging about it and talking about it.”
33 / belief
“Famously, she used Mechanical Turk on Amazon (I think) to get them all hand-labeled.”
34 / belief
“Sebastian Thrun brings Geoff Hinton into the Google fold after this tech talk, (I think) first as a consultant over the next couple of years, then this is a basic later, Geoff Hinton technically becomes an intern at Google.”
35 / belief
“Tele Atlas and Navtech were multi-billion dollar companies. I think maybe one or both of them were public at some point, then got acquired.”
36 / observation
“The problem is the recommender is trying to figure out what to feed, and it’s only just working off titles and descriptions that people were writing about their own videos.”
37 / belief
“All of these incredible advances, this intelligence that we believe is to come will be for the good of everyone, not just for Google and Facebook.”
38 / belief
“There’s an independent oversight board that is set up to make sure that the mission and goals of DeepMind are actually being followed. This is an asset that Google owns today that again, I think is worth half a trillion dollars if it’s independent.”
39 / commitment
“If they’re saying the most capital-intense race in business history is happening right now, we intend to win it. And we have tons of extra cash lying around on top of what we think, plus a safety cushion for investing in that CapEx race.”
40 / belief
“As of today in 2025, this paper has been cited over 173,000 times in other academic papers, making it currently the 7th most cited paper of the 21st century. I think all of the other papers above it on the list have been out much longer.”
41 / belief
“I think the number of AI pitch decks that VCs are seeing is starting to tick up around this time.”
42 / belief
“There was a billion dollars pledged. That came from famously Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston—who (I think) most people don’t realize was part of that initial tranche—and Peter Thiel.”
43 / belief
“I think I trust my Model Y FSD more than you do, but I get what you’re saying. And frankly, regulatorily, you are required to still pay attention in Tesla and not in the Waymo.”
44 / belief
“I think all that is true. Also in the intervening months to year after this meeting between Demis and Elon and Elon investing in DeepMind, Elon also starts to get really, really excited and convinced about the capabilities of AI in the near term, and specifically the capabilities of AI for Tesla.”
45 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if it’s exactly the right analogy, but you might say in today’s Transformer-world–speak, you might say that their context window was pretty short.”
46 / belief
“Alex and Ilya go to Geoff and say, I really think you should have a bigger percent. I think you should have 40% and we should each have 30%.”
47 / prediction
“Jeff Dean does the math, and figures out if people use this for (I don’t know call it) three minutes a day and we roll it out to all billion Android phones, we’re going to need twice the number of data centers that we currently have across all of Google just to handle it.”
48 / evaluation
“The TPU is a giant deal in AI in a way that I think a lot of people don’t realize.”
49 / evaluation
“In theory, this is really bad because it means you would need to be constantly waiting around on any given machine for the other machines to sync their updated parameters before you could proceed.”
50 / evaluation
“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.”
51 / prediction
“The thought process is if you can take a given piece of information and make it smaller, store it away, and then later reinstantiate it in its original form, the only way that you could possibly do that is if whatever force is acting on the data actually understands what it means.”
52 / evaluation
“You don’t know: (a) how far the next breakthrough is because at any given time, there are lots of promising things in the field, most of which don’t work out.”
53 / evaluation
“One of the reasons that the judge cited of why they weren’t going to really take these actions is because of the race in AI. That because tens of billions of dollars of funding have gone into companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and Perplexity, Google essentially has this new war to fight and we’re going to leave it to the free market to do its thing where it creates viable competition on its own, and we’re not going to hamstring Google.”
54 / evaluation
“Because this is Google and they have (I think) the most obfuscated financials of any of the companies we’ve studied, they anger me the most in being able to hide the ball in their financial statements.”
55 / prediction
“I think the AI era we’re entering gets us to think about it.” This is the worst possible thing that could happen to Google, that now Microsoft can actually challenge Google on their own turf, intent on the Internet with a legitimately different, better, differentiated product vector.”
56 / recommendation
“Yeah. Scoping just to ride share now that we have Waymo in San Francisco, I use Waymo in scenarios where I would never use an Uber or a Lyft.”