A little after that. I'd put the heyday between 2003-2010, starting with the GMail launch and ending with the Chrome & Android launches. That period includes GMail, Maps, Scholar, Orkut, Reader, the acquisitions of Blogger/YouTube/Docs/Sheets/Slides/Analytics/Android, Summer of Code, OAuth, Translate, Voice Search, search suggestions, universal search, Picasa, etc. Basically I can look at my phone or computer and basically everything I routinely use dates from that period.
GMail, the service that tells every user that they will be indexed and profiled personally for ad leads? that is an achievement ?
GMail was one of the red flags for many that "don't be evil" was not going to be what it appeared. History says that this kind of mass profiling never ends well.
Agreed. I remember the town hall meeting where they announced the transition to being Alphabet. My manager was flying home from the US at the time. He left a Google employee and landed an Alphabet employee.
I know it was probably meaningless in any real sense, but when they dropped the Dont Be Evil motto, it was a sign that the fun times were drawing to an end.
The quota system can kick in at whatever time the limits are reached.
And GPUs are scattered across borg cells, limiting the ceiling. That's why XBorg was created so that a global search among all Borg cells for researchers.
And data center Capex is around 5 billion each year.
Google makes hundres of billions of revenue each year.
You are asking what people would do in impossible situation. Like "what you do after you are dead", literally I could do nothing after I am dead.
I cannot even understand what I do stands for in the context of your question. The above is my direct reaction in the line that he assumes he had unlimited budget.
> I cannot even understand what I do stands for in the context of your question
That he had a higher budget than he knew what to do with. When I worked at Google I could bring up thousands of workers doing big tasks for hours without issue whenever I wanted, for me that was the same as being infinite since I never needed more, and that team didn't even have a particularly large budget. I can see a top ML team having enough compute budget to run a task on the entire Google scrape index dataset every day to test things, you don't need that much to do that, I wasn't that far from that.
At that point the issue is no longer budget but time for these projects to run and return a result. Of course that was before LLMs, the models before then weren't that expensive.
I know a Google operations guy who has occasionally complained that the developers act like computing/network resources are infinite, so this made me chuckle.
Those were fun times! (& great to see you again after all these years). It's astonishing to me how far the tech has come given what we were working on at the time.