Larry Page and Artificial Intelligence

Larry Page is best known, along with co-founder Sergey Brin, for the creation of Google. Before Google, Page grew up in an ideal environment fostering an interest in computers with his father being a pioneer in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence while his mother was a programming instructor at a neighboring college (Biography.com Editors, 2019). Much like Bill Gates, Larry Page took advantage of the opportunities presented to him at an early age and ran with it. While attending the University of Michigan as an honors student, he created his own makeshift inkjet printer out of LEGOs (Google Research, 2020). He finished up his BS in Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan and then went to Stanford to pursue graduate work in Computer science.

While pursuing graduate work at Stanford, he enrolled in their PhD program. In determining a dissertation topic, he began to explore the “mathematical properties of the World Wide Web”. Encouraged by his supervisor, he ran with this idea, eventually teaming up with future co-founder, Sergey Brin (Piscione, 2014). They dubbed the project “BackRub” and published their paper titled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” (Brin & Page, 1998), laying the ground work for Google’s first search algorithm, PageRank (Piscione, 2014).

Page continued his work, along with Brin, developing the PageRank algorithm. This new algorithm essentially supplanted all existing search engines. This algorithm works by issuing a “vote, by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is” (Rogers, n.d.). With the progress of PageRank, Google was inevitable. Google was incorporated in 1998 with Page as the CEO, and its initial mission statement was to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (Gibbs, 2014). Google had indexed one billion Internet URLs by June of 2000, making it the most comprehensive search engine (Google News, n.d.).

It is indisputable that Page’ innovation, drive, and upbringing all played a role in eventually developing Google (along with Brin), and it has drastically affected lives the world over. With the development of a search engine like Google, the whole world is effectively at everyone’s fingertips. Answers to questions are fractions of a second away. We live in a great age, where the entirety of human knowledge is as easily accessible as it is today. Unfortunately, even with access to an enormous amount of information, it hasn’t necessarily developed a more “intelligent” society. That is up to the individuals who use this technology and what they are seeking to get out of it. This seems to be a trend with any major technological development that is brought to the mainstream level of consumerism.

Today, Larry Page has longed stepped down from Google (and its parent company Alphabet). During his departure there were complaints regarding management issues and sexual misconduct amongst leadership, so not exactly a stellar exit for someone who revolutionized the search engine. His private ventures after Google have been exactly that, private. There are only reports that Page has started a venture in electric flying cars, specifically eVTOLs (electric vertical takeoff and landing) (Harris, 2018). Could this venture revolutionize public transportation or is it just an investment opportunity that Page is hedging a portion of his vast net worth on? Only time will tell.

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