In the end, the Google engineers beat Dean’s deadline by three months, and the difference was the TPU. A sentence that needed ten seconds to translate on ordinary hardware back in February could translate in milliseconds with help from the new Google chip.32 They released the first incarnation of the service just after Labor Day,33 well before Baidu. “I was amazed that it worked that well. I think everybody was,” Hinton says. “Nobody expected it to work so well, so soon.”
