GOOGLE AND AI | ELON MUSK ON TESLA COMP

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

A Google engineer named Eric Lehman warned in 2018 that AI posed a serious threat to Google's search dominance. This concern stemmed from Google's BERT project, which achieved impressive results in web answers (featured snippets). Lehman urged proactive measures to avoid being blindsided by a potential competitor, even a startup, using a similar approach. While Google acknowledged the threat, Lehman eventually left the company in 2022. This internal email highlights Google's early concerns about AI disruption and foretells the rise of alternative search engines like Perplexity, which capitalize on unsupervised learning from raw text.