Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
Google helped create the transformer architecture, yet conversational AI threatens the search ads that fund its business. Its technical advantage creates a commercial dilemma.
Google's core AI advantage matters because it created both the technical foundation and the infrastructure for modern AI, yet still must solve the business transition from search to chatbot-style answers.
While Google cultivated the densest collection of AI talent and invented the foundational transformer architecture in 2017, its open publishing culture allowed nimbler startups to commercialize the technology first.
The hosts argue that Google's custom Tensor Processing Units and global data center network could give it a cost advantage in producing AI tokens.