Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World

by Parmy Olson

In 2017, Google had about eighty thousand salaried employees. Not all of them were engineers. There were curators of the daily Google Doodle that showed up above everybody’s search bar. There were in-office chiropractors and masseuse managers, snackologists who made sure the staff were fueled between their three hot meals at the canteen, horticulturists who looked after the plants, and cleaners who wiped down the foosball tables. Google’s business model was a golden goose. That year its advertising business was generating close to $100 billion annually—a number that would more than double by 2024—so it was natural that much of that money would go toward bulking up its talent. Silicon Valley tended to measure success with two metrics: how much money you had raised from investors, and how many people you had hired.