Former Google CEO made eerie prediction for the future of AI 25 years ago and it's already becoming a reality
Whether you believe people can see into the future or not, there are some spooky coincidences. From The Simpsons to Baba Vanga, it seems some people have a knack for predicting the future. Most think it's all hokum, but when it comes to former Google CEO Larry Page, did he foresee the future of AI back in 2000?
At a time when most of us were worried the Millennium Bug was going to destroy the world, the former Google boss was looking at a very different hindrance/help, depending on what you think of artificial intelligence.
Back when Larry Page and fellow co-founder Sergey Brin were fresh-faced entrepreneurs in their twenties, they sat down and revealed what it was like starting Google. Having been founded just two years earlier when they were PhD students studying at California's Stanford University, little did Brin and Page know what kind of a Goliath that Google was about to become.
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In a resurfaced clip, Page discusses where he sees the internet going and what AI could mean for its future all those years ago.
Back then, Page said: "Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. So if we had the ultimate search engine, it would understand everything on the web. It would understand, you know, exactly what you wanted."
Expanding on where Google could go, Page continued: "It would give you the right thing. And that's obviously artificial intelligence, you know, would be able to answer any question, basically, because almost everything is on the web, right?"
The technology simply wasn't there in 2000, with Page admitting we were 'nowhere near' that back then. Still, he had grand ambitions for Google's AI future, saying that it had been collecting data that would tower to 70 miles high and 6,000 computers working to crack the AI conundrum and store '100 copies' of the whole World Wide Web.
Page concluded that the team was getting 'incrementally closer' to his end goal, but he expected to be doing it for a while: "From an engineering, scientific standpoint, building things to make use of this is a really interesting intellectual exercise.”
It's interesting to note that Page said he had interests in a lot of other ventures aside from just creating a Google god of AI, highlighting his hopes of looking into transportation and sustainable energy. Ultimately, Page stepped away from being Google CEO in 2001, later returning to head up Alphabet Inc. from 2011 until 2015. In 2019, Brin and Page stepped down from all executive positions, although they remain board members and controlling shareholders.
Although Google had used virtual assistants and chatbots like Google Bard, it was the announcement of Gemini in March 2024 that saw Page's vision really come to life as a potential rival to OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Responding to the video and seeing Page as some sort of a modern Nostradamus, one person wrote: "This is crazy level of vision for a product. About 25 years back 😎."
Another shocked fan added: "This clearly articulates how long Google has actually been working on solving AI. 25 years later and thousands of PhDs and now we have Google Gemini."
Someone else concluded: "Crazy how spot-on Larry Page was! He saw AI’s potential way before it became the powerhouse it is today. Talk about visionary!"
Others have criticized Google's AI results, although it's recently seen praise for solving a two-year problem. Whatever you think of AI and the current version of Google being so tied to it, there's no escaping the fact that Page had an eerie knack for seemingly predicting where things were heading.