“By 2026, Google's flagship product will not be search but AI.”
— kevin kelly2016
When Kevin Kelly met Larry Page at a party in 2002, he asked him why anyone would invest in a company that gives away its product for free, and he said, “I still don't know. There are a lot of search companies. Is web search free? Where does it go?”
Mr. Page's response was both memorable and prophetic. “Oh, we're really building AI.”
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.
“Rather than using AI to improve search,” he wrote 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're training Google AI.”
Kelly was right about search engines. Training AI will prove far more effective than serving ads.
But from the perspective of 2025, we can make an even bigger claim. the whole internet It was to train the AI.
At least that's the view of Alex Tabarrok, who recently told Tyler Cowen that history will remember the Internet primarily as the “agar culture for the growth of AI,” the nutrient-rich Petri dish in which it was born.
“That's why the Internet is so important,” Cowen agreed. “We're just starting to realize this, aren't we?”
Tabarrok added: “If you look back…you'll think, 'What was the Internet?'” It was because of AI that we brought everything online. It wasn't for us. I don't think anyone thought of that. ”
Except for Larry Page!
And perhaps Page's father is a pioneer in AI research.
Page co-founder Sergey Brin is also an AI-savvy machine learning expert who contributed code to Gemini, Google's large-scale language model.
None of these three were featured on the cover of Time magazine this week as “Architects of AI.”
But Google's search engine worked exactly as they intended, so perhaps they should have.
“The ultimate search engine will understand everything on the web. It will know exactly what you want and give you the right thing. It's obviously artificial intelligence. It can answer any question because almost everything is on the web,” Page explained in 2000.
Who put it there? Of course I did.
“When you type 'Easter Bunny' into the image search bar and click on the image that looks most like the Easter Bunny, you are teaching the AI what the Easter Bunny looks like. Each of the 3 billion queries that Google runs every day teaches the deep learning AI over and over again,” Kelly wrote in 2016.
Today, there are up to 16 billion Google queries per day.
So really you Thanks to all the important Google searches you've done over the years, you should be on the cover of this week's Time magazine.
Thank you for using our service.
Let's check the chart.
More power:
According to a16z, data center power consumption forecasts are up 36% from April. AI stocks are down today in part because we don't have enough power to run all the data centers we need (or think we need).
Power to the people:
China's big advantage in competing with AGI is that it will soon be generating three times as much electricity as the United States.
Investment role reversal:
Paul Kedrosky points out that Microsoft (traditionally an asset-light company) now spends more than twice as much of its revenue on capital expenditures as Exxon (traditionally an asset-heavy company).
Non-investment advice:
A study by Finra found that 61% of investors under 35 use YouTube for investment advice. This to me suggests that Australia got it wrong when it banned under-16s from using social media this week. In fact, it should have been banned for people over 30.
Avoiding a food price crisis:
Contrary to what social media says, there is no grocery store price crisis. As a percentage of disposable income, household groceries (in blue) have become cheaper. Our total (red) food expenses haven't changed, it's just that we're getting lazier (yellow).
The stock market is not just about AI.
This week, the equivalent index S&P 500 hit an all-time high.
Demographic time bomb:
Sam Bowman introduces an astonishing statistic: “For every 100 Koreans today, only six great-grandchildren are born.'' 6 instead of 6 each In total. Thankfully, AI should do most of the work by then.
All this year's figures:
Note that The Computer was a Time Magazine “person” in 1982. Although not labeled above, you are the 2006 winner. The 2006 award recognized individual content creators who post YouTube videos, blog posts, Instagram photos, and Reddit comments on the World Wide Web.
This year, “you” rightfully should have joined the nine U.S. presidents as regular honorees. Because if we didn't embed content on the web, the “designers of AI” wouldn't have anything to work with.
Your training session is now complete. Please proceed outdoors.
I hope all my readers have a great weekend this year.
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