Great Tech Firms · Internet & AI
From BackRub at Stanford to Alphabet: PageRank, the AdWords auction that funded everything, the 2004 Dutch-auction IPO, YouTube and Android, DeepMind and the Transformer, and the 2024 antitrust ruling.
Step 1 of 6 · Overview30 min read ·
Key idea
Prereqs: Network effects; Linear algebra: eigenvectors. Next: OpenAI & the AI labs. Sources: Brin & Page, 'The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine' (1998); Steven Levy, *In the Plex* (2011); US v. Google ruling (Aug 2024).Next: 1. Timeline