“By 2026, Google’s biggest product will not be search but AI.”
– Kevin Kelly2016
When Kevin Kelly met Larry Page at a party in 2002, he asked why someone would invest in a company that offers its products for free: “I still don’t get it. There are so many search companies. Searching the Internet, free? Where does that get you?”
Page’s answer was memorable and prophetic: “Oh, we’re building AI.”
This was two years before Facebook, three years before YouTube, five years before the iPhone 20 years before ChatGPT.
For Kelly, it was an “aha” moment.
“Instead of using AI to make the search better,” he said he wrote in 2016, “Google is using search to improve its AI. Every time you type a question, click on a link generated by a search, or create a link on the Internet, you are training Google AI.”
Kelly was right about search engines – training AI would be more effective than sending ads.
But in terms of 2025, we can say: The real goal of the entire internet he was teaching AI.
This, perhaps, is the opinion of Alex Tabarrok, who recently told Tyler Cowen that history will remember the Internet mainly as “agar culture for the growth of AI” – i.e., the rich petri dish that started it.
“That’s why the Internet is important,” Cowen agreed. “We’re just starting to realize this, aren’t we?”
“When we look back,” Tabarrok added, “we’ll think about … ‘What was the Internet like?’ Putting everything online was for AI. It wasn’t about us. I don’t think anyone thought about that.”
Except Larry Page!
And maybe Page’s father, a pioneer in AI research.
Also the co-founder of Page, Sergey Brin, is a machine learning expert so good at AI that he has contributed code to Google’s main language model, Gemini.
None of the three made the cover of Time magazine as “AI builder” this week.
But maybe they should have, because the Google search engine did what they wanted.
“A powerful search engine can understand everything on the Internet,” Page he explained Back in 2000. “It can understand what you want and give you what’s right and it’s obviously artificial intelligence; so you can answer any question, because almost everything is online.”
Who put it there? You did, of course.
“If you type ‘Easter Bunny’ into the image search bar,” Kelly wrote in 2016, “and then click on a really cute picture of the Easter Bunny, you’re teaching the AI what the Easter Bunny looks like. Each of the three billion queries that Google does every day is deep-learning the AI over and over again.”
We now have up to 16 billion queries on Google per day!
So, basically you should be on the cover of Time Magazine this week – for all the years of valuable Googling you’ve done.
Thank you for your work.
Let’s look at the charts.
More power, please:
at 16zData center energy usage forecasts have increased by 36% since April. AI-related products were down today in part because they can’t get enough power to manage all the data centers they need (or think they need).
Power to people:
China’s biggest advantage in the race to AGI is that soon, it will produce 3x more energy than the US.
Job changes:
Paul Kedrosky says that as sales increase, Microsoft (a traditionally light business) is now spending twice as much on capex as Exxon (a heavy business).
Investment tips:
A Finra study found that 61% of investors under the age of 35 use YouTube for advice. To me, this shows that Australia got it wrong when it banned 16-year-olds from social media this week. They should ban more than 30 years instead.
Without the hassle of grocery prices:
Contrary to what the media would have you believe, there is no problem with grocery prices: As spending increases, household (blue) food costs have fallen. Overall (red), our food budget hasn’t changed, but because we’re being lazy (yellow).
The stock market is not just about AI:
The same-weighted S&P 500 rose sharply this week.
Human time bomb:
Sam Bowman parts a surprising statistic: “100 South Koreans today will have only 6 grandchildren among them.” Not six each – six everything. Fortunately, the AI should be doing a lot of work by then.
Annual population:
Note that The Computer was Time Magazine’s “person of the year” in 1982. Not listed above is the 2006 winner: you. The 2006 award recognized creators of documentaries that filled wworld wide web and YouTube videos, blog posts, Instagram photos and Reddit comments.
This year, “you” should have joined the nine US presidents as a repeat winner, because if we hadn’t filled the internet with what we have, the “AI experts” wouldn’t be there.
Your training is now complete. Please go outside.
Have a great week, annual readers.
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