Google: The AI Company (Fall 2025) (www.acquired.fm)

Acquired’s Fall 2025 episode “Google: The AI Company” traces Google’s two‑decade AI arc — from early language models and Google Brain through the 2017 Transformer paper that underpins today’s LLM era — and frames Google’s current predicament as the largest possible innovator’s dilemma. Despite inventing the Transformer and assembling the era’s deepest bench of talent (Ilya Sutskever, Geoff Hinton, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei and many others), Google was blindsided by ChatGPT’s November 2022 commercial success. The episode explores how talent exits, open research, and startups like OpenAI and Anthropic turned Google’s foundational innovations into external products, forcing an “all‑hands” reaction centered on Gemini. Technically and strategically, Google still holds rare assets: Gemini as a frontier model, production TPUs (alongside NVIDIA GPUs) at scale, and its own massive hosting via Google Cloud (~$50B revenue), plus the single most valuable consumer “text box” in Search that generates huge profits (~$140B annual cash machine). The core tension: can Google aggressively pivot to AI-first products without cannibalizing Search’s profitability, or will protecting that cash flow leave them commoditized? The episode also flags Waymo as a potential internal moonshot. For the AI/ML community, it’s a case study in how research leadership, infrastructure (chips + cloud), and product strategy interact — and why having both frontier models and custom silicon matters to avoid becoming a commodity.