Larry Page

Larry Page (born 1973 in Michigan) invented the PageRank algorithm as a Stanford graduate student and co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in 1998. He served as Google’s founding CEO, returned to the role in 2011, and led Alphabet until 2019, remaining a board member and controlling shareholder. As early as 2000 he framed the company’s destiny in AI terms, calling artificial intelligence “the ultimate version of Google.”

The quiet financier of the AI age

Page rarely gives interviews, so his AI advocacy is measured in decisions rather than speeches: he championed Google Brain, hired Ray Kurzweil, and personally drove Google’s 2014 acquisition of DeepMind — a deal Elon Musk reportedly tried to block. According to Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography of Musk, the two friends fell out at Musk’s 2015 birthday party in Napa, where Page accused Musk of being a “speciesist” for privileging biological humans over future digital minds. Musk retorted that yes, he was pro-human — and co-founded OpenAI months later, partly out of fear of AI controlled by Page.

Page has expressed the view that machine intelligence is a natural next step of evolution and that trying to stop it would be futile — a stance critics call cavalier about humanity’s interests, and one that made him a central villain in early AI-risk circles. Since stepping back in 2019 he has been nearly silent in public, even as the company he built races toward AGI with Gemini.