Genius Makers

In one sentence: Cade Metz's 2021 history of the deep learning boom, a book the Acquired hosts introduce mid-episode as "a great book on the whole history of AI" they'd "reference a lot" in covering Google's AI story, and it delivers two of the episode's sharpest details: Larry Page's secret South Pacific strategy retreat and Alex Krizhevsky smuggling a GPU into a Google supply closet.

Overview

Metz has covered deep learning and the AI industry for years, first at Wired and later at The New York Times. The book's throughline is the trio of deep learning "godfathers," Geoff Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun, and the companies their work eventually pulled into its orbit: Google, Facebook, DeepMind, OpenAI. Acquired draws on two specific passages. One covers a strategy retreat Larry Page held in late 2013 on an island in the South Pacific the book never names, where he concluded deep learning would reshape the entire industry and handed engineering lead Alan Eustace something close to a blank check to go hire researchers. The other is quoted in full: Alex Krizhevsky, the researcher who trained AlexNet on two consumer graphics cards, arrives at Google to find its machine learning models still running on CPUs, walks to a local electronics store, buys a GPU, plugs it in inside a supply closet down the hall from his desk, and starts training his own networks on Google's electric bill, until the setup forces Jeff Dean and Alan Eustace to rewrite the Distbelief training system from CPUs to GPUs.

Why It's Recommended

Ben credits the source mid-story, while narrating the DNN Research auction: "we got to thank Cade Metz, the author of Genius Makers, great book on the whole history of AI that we're actually going to reference a lot in this episode." When he gets to Page's island retreat, he cites it again: "In Cade Metz' book, it's an undisclosed island." The Krizhevsky GPU story is read straight from the page. In the closing thank-yous, David and Ben name Metz separately, a second time. The book fills in what In the Plex doesn't cover: how deep learning went, over the course of the 2010s, from a fringe academic pursuit to an arms race a handful of Silicon Valley companies were willing to spend real money on. The secret island meeting and the smuggled GPU are the concrete scenes that carry that arc.

Source

A core source for Google: The AI Company: the details of Larry Page's South Pacific strategy retreat and the full quoted passage on Alex Krizhevsky buying his own GPU are drawn directly from this book; the claim that DeepMind's founders would have made roughly twice as much money taking Facebook's offer over Google's is corroborated by it as well. (First published 2021 by Dutton.)