In late 2012, on the shores of Lake Tahoe, a newborn company with three employees went up for auction. Baidu, Google, Microsoft, and DeepMind joined the bidding. The outcome would determine the future of computing. (From 2021)
, cofounded by a young neuroscientist named Demis Hassabis, that most of the world had never heard of.’s head of engineering, flew his own twin-engine plane into the airport near the south shore of Lake Tahoe. He and Jeff Dean, Google’s most revered engineer, had dinner with Hinton and his students in the restaurant on the top floor of Harrah’s, a steak house decorated with a thousand wine bottles. It was Hinton’s 65th birthday.
The bids arrived via Gmail, just because that was where he kept an email account. But according to Hinton, Microsoft didn’t like the arrangement. In the days before the auction, the company complained that Google, its biggest rival and likeliest competitor in the auction, could eavesdrop on private messages and somehow game the bids.
At about $22 million, Hinton temporarily suspended the auction to hold a discussion with one of the bidders, and half an hour later Microsoft dropped out again. That left Baidu and Google, and as the hours passed, the two companies took the price still higher. Kai Yu handled the initial Baidu bids, but when the price reached $24 million, a Baidu executive took over from Beijing.
After one visit, Yu left the room without his backpack, and when Hinton and his students noticed it sitting on a chair, they wondered if they should open it to see if anything inside would tell them how high Baidu was willing to bid. But knowing it wasn’t the right thing to do, they didn’t. In any case, they soon discovered Baidu was willing to go much higher: $25 million, $30 million, $35 million.
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