Google is in the headlines after the launch of its Gemini 3.0 and Nano Banana Pro AI models. The tech giant has now incorporated Search and its other business with Gemini models but as per a resurfaced video, the foundation of AI-first company was laid a quarter-century ago. In a rare clip from the year 2000, which is just two years after Google’s founding, co-founder Larry Page accurately predicted the exact technological shift that would define the company twenty-five years later. “If we had the ultimate search engine, it would understand everything on the web,” Page said in the archival footage. “It would understand exactly what you wanted and it would give you the right thing. That’s obviously artificial intelligence—to be able to answer any question basically because almost everything is on the web,” he said.
Larry Page defines what is going to be the ultimate search engine
Page’s definition of the “ultimate search engine” describes the capabilities of today’s generative AI, which synthesises information to provide answers rather than just providing a list of links.In the footage, Page admitted that the company was “nowhere near” achieving true AI at the time, but emphasised they were working to get “incrementally closer.”“We’re no where near doing that now however we can get incrementally closer to that and that’s basically what we work on. And that’s tremendously interesting from an intellectual standpoint, right? We all this data. If you printed out our index it would be 70 miles high. We have all this computation, we have 6000 computers. So we have a lot of resources available. We have enough space to store 100 copies of the whole web,” he said.“So if you have a really interesting confluence of a lot of different things, right? Lot of computation, lot of data. That didn’t used to be available. And from an engineering and scientific standpoint, building things to make use of this is a very interesting intellectual exercise,” he added.
About the Author
