E69: Lost Tapes: Elad Gil on the Eve of the AI Boom

This ‘lost episode’ of Turpentine VC with investor Elad Gil was recorded at a unique moment in time (September 2022) — before ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity launched. Drawing from his experiences at Google, Elad discusses early ML systems, the open source debate, NVIDIA, labor markets, and AI alignment and shares some behind the scenes anecdotes.

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LINKS:

Attention Is All You Need: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/3f5ee243547dee91fbd053c1c4a845aa-Paper.pdf 

AI Revolution - Transformers and Large Language Models (LLMs): https://blog.eladgil.com/p/ai-revolution-transformers-and-large 

Elad’s website: https://eladgil.com/ 

High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil: https://growth.eladgil.com/ | https://www.amazon.com/High-Growth-Handbook-Elad-Gil/dp/1732265100 

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HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE EPISODE:

• This episode was recorded in 2022, before the launch of ChatGPT, Claude, and other major AI applications that are now common. This interview captured a moment in time when industry leaders were anticipating major breakthroughs in AI.
• Elad explained how AI's definition has evolved from basic automation in the 1980s to sophisticated applications, with Google emerging as the first true "AI-first" company at scale through its search and ad targeting systems.
• The 2017 "Attention is All You Need" paper proved pivotal, with six of its eight authors going on to start companies, creating what Gil compared t