X – formerly Google X – aims to pursue technological breakthroughs by taking crazy ideas seriously. When will its bets pay off?
Gandalf arrives on rollerblades. It’s morning in the cafeteria at X – formerly Google X – and Astro Teller, X’s Captain of Moonshots, glides over dressed in coarse grey robes and a pointed hat, carrying oatmeal. Jedi stroll past to their desks, gripping coffee. Star Fleet officers queue for breakfast. This, it should be said, is unusual – it’s Halloween. But X is a surreal place. Outside, self-driving cars loop around the block. Sections of stratospheric balloons, designed to broadcast internet to remote places, hang in the lobby. Robots wheel around, sorting the recycling. Teller likens X to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory; it seems only fitting that there be costumes.
Even standing inside X – a cavernous former mall in Mountain View, California – it’s hard to articulate exactly what X is. Within Alphabet, Google’s parent company, it is grouped alongside Deepmind in "Other Bets", although in that metaphor, X is more like the gambler. Its stated aim is to pursue what it calls “moonshots” – to try to solve humanity’s great problems by inventing radical new technologies. To that end, besides the self-driving cars (now a standalone company, Waymo) and internet balloons (Loon), X has built delivery drones (Wing), contact lenses that measure glucose in the tears of diabetics (Verily) and technology to store electricity using molten salt (Malta). It has pursued, but ultimately abandoned, attempts to create carbon neutral fuel from seawater, and replace ocean freight with cargo blimps. It once earnestly debated laying a giant copper ring around the North Pole to generate electricity from the Earth’s magnetic field.That might sound fantastical or even absurd, but every day you almost certainly use something developed at X. Google Brain, the deep-learning division that now informs everything from Google Search to Translate, began at X. So did camera software GCam, used in Google Pixel phones; indoor mapping in Google Maps; and Wear OS, Android’s operating system for wearable devices.
But those are beside the point. “Google Brain, the cars, Verily, everything else – those are symptoms. Side effects of trying weird things, things that are unlikely to work,” Teller says. “We are a creativity organisation, not a technology organisation.” The rollerblades, which he wears every day, are tucked neatly under the table. (They save him eight minutes a day between meetings.) X, he explains, is not so much a company as a radical way of thinking, a method of pursuing technological breakthroughs by taking crazy ideas seriously. X’s job is not to invent new Google products, but to produce the inventions that might form the next Google.X was once seen as a punchline in Silicon Valley (and on Silicon Valley). Today, its self-driving cars have logged 10 million miles on public roads, and operate an autonomous ride-sharing service in Arizona. Loon’s balloons provide internet access to communities in rural Peru and Kenya. Wing, X’s drone delivery effort, is carrying food and medicines to customers in Australia. Still, as Alphabet continues to be buffeted by employee protests and leadership changes – in December 2019, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped down, handing the company to Google CEO Sundar Pichai – X is facing renewed scrutiny to prove that its moonshots are more than just an indulgence, or expensive PR stunts. X celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2020. When will its bets pay off?
Alphabet is not the first company to set up a laboratory for chasing moonshot ideas. In 1925, AT&T and Western Electric founded Bell Labs, which assembled scientists and engineers from different disciplines to advance the field of telecommunications. Bell Labs invented the transistor, the first lasers and photovoltaic cells, winning nine Nobel prizes in the process. Ever since, corporate research labs, from Xerox PARC to Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works and DuPont’s Experimental Station, have played a central role in producing breakthrough inventions. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon all have corporate research labs. Google has several, including Google AI (formerly Google Research), Robotics at Google, and Advanced Technologies and Projects, which works on things like AR and smart fabrics.But corporate research labs are flawed. Big companies, chasing quarterly results, often ignore transformative ideas even from within their own organisations. Xerox PARC invented the graphical user interface, but we don’t sit at Xerox laptops. As startups grow into corporations, bureaucracy can take over, and their capacity to think creatively wanes. “Over a 20 to 30 year period, companies tend to move from experimentation to process,” Teller explains. “Process is an attempt to get surprise all the way down to zero. Experimentation is the complete, constant bathing in surprise. You can’t have both.”X does not call itself a corporate research lab (it uses the term “Moonshot Factory”), but when it was founded in 2010, its remit wasn’t entirely clear. X originally grew out of Chauffeur, Google’s self-driving car project, then spearheaded by the Stanford roboticist Sebastian Thrun. Page and Brin admired Thrun for his work on Streetview and turn-by-turn directions in Google Maps, and at X they offered him free reign to pursue similarly offbeat ideas. “Initially, the title was called ‘Director of Other’,” Thrun says. “We wanted to push technologies in many different directions, including self-driving cars.”For at least a year, X’s existence was a closely guarded secret. Other Google employees were denied keycard access. Even within Google, where bottom-up management is a founding principle and employees are allowed to spend 20 per cent of their time working on their own ideas, X had a free-wheeling, intellectually anarchic style. Engineers from Project Chauffeur worked alongside those from Google Brain, Loon and a handful of other equally audacious projects. “I wanted to get no bureaucracy, no PowerPoints, no financial reporting, no oversight, so that the people in charge could focus entirely on the challenge,” Thrun says. Most of the early project ideas came from Page and Brin themselves, who took a close interest, and eventually moved into X’s building. (Teller once described X as Brin’s “batcave”.)When Thrun left X in 2012 for Udacity, his online education company, Teller took over. He was, in many ways, the natural choice. His paternal grandfather is Edward Teller, known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, and the co-founder of the US’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His maternal grandfather was a Nobel prize-winning economist. “I grew up as the dumb one in my family,” says Teller. “My family believed that being smart was the only thing that mattered. I wasn’t going to win on those terms. As a result, it forced me to explore other ways to be successful.” Before joining X, Astro (a nickname; his real name is Eric) founded an AI hedge fund, and sold a wearable sensors company. He has finished two novels and co-written a book of relationship advice. At school, to compensate for mild dyslexia, he would do every problem twice, using different methods. “Then if I came up with the same answer, it was the right answer,” he says. The experience taught him early the value of experimental thinking – “to just try things fast, to approximate at the beginning, and come at the problem from different angles.”When Teller took over at X, it had little structure. “I would describe it as like the Wild West. We just started projects when we were interested in things. There was almost no process whatsoever,” says Obi Felten, who joined X from Google in 2012. Teller hired Felten, who then worked in Google’s product marketing department, to formalise the moonshot process. While the engineers pushed the frontiers of artificial neural networks and high-altitude ballooning, Felten says she dealt with “literally everything that wasn’t the tech. Legal policy, marketing, PR, partnerships. They’d never had a business plan for any of the projects before.” Her job title was "Head of Getting Moonshots Ready for Contact With the Real World".Not all X projects survived first contact. One of the first was Google Glass, a wearable computer inside a pair of spectacles. Brin loved the idea, and pushed X hard to turn the early prototypes into a consumer product. When Glass eventually launched in 2013, Google created huge fanfare. Skydivers wearing Glass parachuted on to the roof of its annual developers' conference. Models wore them on the runway at New York Fashion Week. They were featured on The Simpsons and in Vogue.
But in the real world, Glass faced poor reviews, mockery (“Glassholes”) and outrage at potential invasions of privacy. “The real failure that we had with Glass was when we were trying to talk about it as a learning platform, the public started responding to it like a product,” Teller says. “What was worse is we fell into the trap of talking about it that way ourselves. And that was terrible, because it was not a finished product.”...
....MUCH MORE
Previously on X and Mr. Teller:
"The Moonshot to Create the Next Google"
A Long Way from Search: Google-X Team To Meet With the Food and Drug Administration (GOOG)
"Google's secret lab admits to exploring space elevator designs" (GOOG)
"Google begins launching Internet-beaming balloons" (GOOG)
A Long Way from Search: Google-X Team To Meet With the Food and Drug Administration (GOOG)
"Google's secret lab admits to exploring space elevator designs" (GOOG)
"Google begins launching Internet-beaming balloons" (GOOG)
And some related GOOG stories:
