“By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search, but artificial intelligence.”
— Kevin Kelly2016
When Kevin Kelly met Larry Page at a party in 2002, he asked him why anyone would invest in a company that offered its products for free: “I still don’t get it. There are a lot of search companies out there. Searching the web for free? Where does that take you?”
Page’s response was memorable and prophetic: “Oh, we’re making really artificial intelligence.”
That was two years before Facebook, three years before YouTube, and five years before the iPhone 20 years Before ChatGPT.
For Kelly, it was an “aha” moment.
“Instead of using artificial intelligence to improve the search process,” he added. books In 2016, “Google uses search to improve its AI. Every time you type a query, click a link generated by search, or create a link on the web, you are training Google’s AI.”
Kelly was right about search engines: training AI will be much more important than displaying ads.
But from the perspective of 2025, we can make a bigger claim: the true purpose of The entire Internet It was to train artificial intelligence.
That, at least, is the view of Alex Tabarek, who recently told Tyler Cowen that history will remember the Internet primarily as “the agar culture of AI growth”—that is, the nutrient-rich Petri dish from which it arose.
“That’s why the Internet is important,” Quinn agrees. “We’re just starting to realize that, aren’t we?”
“When we look back, we’ll think, ‘What is the Internet?'” Tabarrok added. “Putting everything online was for AI. It wasn’t for us. I don’t think anyone thought about that.”
Except for Larry Page!
And perhaps Paige’s father, a pioneer in artificial intelligence research.
So is Page’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, a machine learning expert so experienced in AI that he helped create the code for Google’s massive language model, Gemini.
None of these three covered Time magazine As this week’s “AI Engineer.”
But maybe they should have, because Google did exactly what they wanted it to do.
“The ultimate search engine will understand everything on the Internet,” Paige said He explained It dates back to 2000. “It will understand exactly what you want and give you the right thing, and that’s obviously artificial intelligence; to be able to answer any question, because almost everything is on the web.”
Who put it there? Of course I did.
“When you type ‘Easter bunny’ into the image search bar, and then click on the image that looks like an Easter bunny, you are teaching the AI what the Easter Bunny looks like,” Kelly wrote in 2016. “Every one of the three billion queries Google makes every day teaches the deep learning AI over and over again.”
We now have up to 16 billion queries on Google every day!
truly You It should be on the cover of Time magazine this week — many years of significant Google research.
Thank you for your service.
Let’s check the charts.
More power please:
For a16zData center energy consumption forecasts have risen by 36% since just April. AI-related stocks fell today in part because they can’t get enough power to run all the data centers they need (or think they need).
Power to the people:
China’s biggest advantage in the race toward artificial general intelligence is that it will soon generate three times as much energy as the United States.
Reversing the role of investment:
Paul Kedrosky points out that Microsoft (a traditional asset-light company) now spends, as a percentage of sales, more than twice as much on capital expenditures as Exxon (a traditional asset-intensive company).
No investment advice:
A Finra survey found that 61% of investors under 35 use YouTube for investment advice. To me, this suggests Australia got it wrong when it banned under-16s from using social media this week. They should have banned people over 30 instead.
No grocery price crisis:
Contrary to what social media would have you believe, there is no crisis in grocery store prices: as a percentage of disposable income, food at home (in blue) has become cheaper. Overall (in red), our food budget has remained unchanged, but only because we have become lazier (in yellow).
The stock market is not just about artificial intelligence:
The equal-weight S&P 500 index hit an all-time high this week.
Demographic time bomb:
Sam Bowman shares Amazing statistic: “Every 100 South Koreans today will have only 6 great-grandchildren.” Not six each – six In total. Fortunately, AI should be doing most of the jobs by then.
All Sunni people:
Note that the computer was Time magazine’s “Person” of the Year for 1982. The 2006 winner is not mentioned above: you. The 2006 award recognized the individual content creators who populate the wWorld Wide Web Through YouTube videos, blog posts, Instagram photos, and Reddit comments.
This year, “You” should rightfully join nine US presidents as repeat winners, because if we didn’t fill the web with our own content, the “AI engineers” wouldn’t have anything to work with.
Your training session is now complete. Please proceed outdoors.
Have a great weekend, readers of the year.
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