Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and the World

by Cade Metz

As he recovered from the first surgery on his hip, Lu urged the Microsoft brain trust to embrace the idea of a driverless car. Myriad tech companies and carmakers had a long head start with their autonomous vehicles, and Lu wasn’t exactly sure how Microsoft would enter this increasingly crowded market. But that wasn’t the issue. His argument wasn’t that Microsoft should sell a driverless car. It was that Microsoft should build one. This would give the company the skills and the technologies and the insight it needed to succeed in so many other areas. Google had come to dominate so many markets, Lu believed, because it built a search engine in the era when the Internet was expanding as no one had ever seen. Engineers like Jeff Dean were forced to build technologies no one had ever built, and in the years that followed, these technologies drove everything from Gmail to YouTube to Android. “It is not that people at Google drink different waters,” he said. “The search engine required them to solve a set of technological challenges.” Building a self-driving car, Lu believed, would enrich Microsoft’s future in the same way. “We must put ourselves in a position to see the future of computing.”