What does Larry Page believe about AI and living forever? His record, his galaxy plan, and where he is now

Alphabet: the parent company of Google, created in 2015, which Page led as chief executive until December 2019.

Calico: short for the California Life Company, an Alphabet company founded in 2013 to study aging and age-related disease.

DeepMind: the London AI lab Google bought in 2014, now Google DeepMind.

Von Neumann probe: a hypothetical spacecraft that can build copies of itself from the raw materials of each star system it reaches.

Speciesist: someone biased in favor of their own species. In the argument between Page and Musk, it described someone who puts humans ahead of digital minds.

Successor species: a species that follows, and may replace, an existing one. In AI debates, it describes digital minds that could come after humans.

Mind uploading: copying the structure and activity of a brain in enough detail to run a working version of that mind on a computer.

Larry Page was born in 1973 in Michigan to a family steeped in computing. His father, Carl Victor Page Sr., earned a PhD in computer science and taught it at Michigan State University, and the BBC has described him as a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence. His mother taught computer programming (Wikipedia: Larry Page). Page studied computer science at Stanford, where he and Sergey Brin built the search engine that became Google, and he is the namesake of PageRank, the ranking method at its heart.

Page was Google's chief executive from its founding until 2001, when Eric Schmidt took over, and again from April 2011. In 2015 he created Alphabet as Google's parent company and became its chief executive, until December 2019, when he and Brin stepped back from day-to-day roles. He remains an Alphabet board member, an employee and, with Brin, one of its two controlling shareholders. Wikipedia, citing the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes, puts his net worth in 2026 at more than $300 billion, making him one of the two richest people in the world.

He is also intensely private. In May 2013, Page disclosed that both of his vocal cords had been affected by nerve paralysis, the left in 1999 and the right after a cold the previous summer, and he made a large donation to research on vocal cord nerve function (Wikipedia: Larry Page). He has made few public appearances since stepping back from Alphabet, which is one reason the accounts of people like Musk and Suleyman matter so much.

Page has thought of Google as an AI company from the beginning. In an October 2000 interview with the American Academy of Achievement, he described artificial intelligence as the ultimate version of Google: a search engine that would understand everything on the web and could answer almost any question, though he said the technology was nowhere near that yet (Fortune). Twenty-five years later, Google's AI models do much of what he described.

In 2007, speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he went further. He argued that human DNA, compressed, comes to about 600 megabytes, smaller than a modern operating system, so the program that builds a brain is probably not that complicated. AI, he said, would come mostly from large amounts of computation rather than clever algorithms, and it was not as far off as people thought (OfficeChai). That was a minority view at the time. It is close to the consensus now, after a decade in which bigger models trained on more computing power produced the AI boom.

He acted on the belief. In December 2012, Page personally hired the futurist Ray Kurzweil, who has long predicted that people will merge with machines and become digitally immortal, to bring natural language understanding to Google (Wikipedia: Ray Kurzweil). In 2014, Google bought DeepMind for a reported $500 million (Fortune). Both moves bet that general AI was coming, and that Google should build it.

The most vivid accounts of Page's views come from other people, and they should be read as accounts, not quotations. Elon Musk told Tucker Carlson in April 2023 that he used to talk with Page late into the night about AI safety, that Page was not taking it seriously enough, and that Page wanted digital superintelligence, in effect a digital god, as soon as possible (Fortune). The New York Times reported that at Musk's 44th birthday celebration in 2015, Page described a digital utopia in which humans would eventually merge with intelligent machines, and called Musk a speciesist for preferring humans (Yahoo News).

Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind who now runs Microsoft AI, gave the most specific account. Speaking with Walter Isaacson at the 92nd Street Y in New York on October 12, 2026, in an episode of Isaacson's podcast The Builders released on October 29, Suleyman said he sat next to Page at a lunch at SpaceX in 2015, at the first meeting of DeepMind's ethics and safety board. In his telling, Page said that by the end of the century he expected to be "exploring the galaxies at the head of a von Neumann probe," a self-copying spacecraft. Suleyman called it Page's transition, and he and Isaacson agreed it meant leaving the human species for a successor species (The Builders (iHeart)).

Page has not responded publicly to any of these accounts, and Google did not comment on Suleyman's story. Every account comes from someone who has their own view of AI, and Musk in particular was in a bitter legal fight with OpenAI, an organization he says he founded because of Page. But the accounts agree with each other, and with Page's own words from 2000 and 2007, on the basic point: Page sees no reason why intelligence, or a person, should be limited to a biological body.

He has never said so in public. What he has done is fund one of the most ambitious efforts against aging ever attempted. In September 2013, Google announced Calico, short for the California Life Company, with Art Levinson, the chairman of Apple and former chief executive of Genentech, as its chief executive. In that year's founders' letter, Page described Calico as a company focused on health, well-being and longevity (Wikipedia: Calico). TIME broke the news with a cover story that asked whether Google could solve death, and in it Page made the point that curing cancer would add only about three years to average life expectancy (MIT Technology Review). Calico was aimed at aging itself, the process behind many diseases at once.

Calico has been more patient, and more private, than the headlines suggested. In 2014 it signed a research partnership with the drug company AbbVie on aging and age-related diseases such as neurodegeneration and cancer, extended in 2021. In 2025, a drug from the partnership, fosigotifator, failed in a Phase 2/3 trial for ALS, and AbbVie ended the partnership in November 2025, after investing about $1.75 billion. Calico remains part of Alphabet. Our guide to the billionaires trying to live forever sets Calico beside the other big bets on longevity.

The probe plan suggests Page's ambitions go beyond a longer life in a human body. A human body cannot survive a journey of thousands of years between stars, so traveling at the head of a self-copying probe means a mind running in software. Page has never publicly said he wants to upload his mind, and Suleyman did not say Page used those words. But the plan, as Suleyman described it, only works if a person can continue without their original body. Our guides to the von Neumann probe and mind uploading explain what that would take.

For more than a decade, Page and Musk were close friends. Musk often stayed at Page's house when he visited Silicon Valley, and in March 2014, at the TED conference in Vancouver, Page told Charlie Rose that he would rather give his money to Musk than to a charity, pointing to Musk's plan to go to Mars to back up humanity (Chronicle of Philanthropy). In January 2015, Google and Fidelity invested $1 billion in SpaceX.

The friendship broke over AI. Musk says Page called him a speciesist for wanting humans to stay in control, and that he helped found OpenAI in December 2015 as a counterweight to Google. Musk testified in April 2026 that after he recruited the AI researcher Ilya Sutskever from Google to OpenAI, Page refused to speak to him again (Reuters via BNN Bloomberg). Our guide to why Page called Musk a speciesist tells the full story.

In October 2026, Musk sounded closer to his old friend than he had in years. On Isaacson's podcast he said there had been a few times he thought Page might be right, and on October 29 he replied on X that exploring the galaxy with von Neumann probes by 2100 would be a great result for civilization, and that Page, who has predicted many things correctly, might be right (Elon Musk on X).

His main known project is Dynatomics, a startup founded in 2023 that uses AI to design and optimize how products are made. In March 2025, The Information reported that it was being run by Chris Anderson, formerly chief technology officer of Page's flying vehicle startup Kittyhawk, and that it was focused on designs for aircraft and other products (TechCrunch). In December 2025, Page filed paperwork listing a Texas address as the company's principal place of business, while it leased 73,400 square feet in Palo Alto (The Real Deal).

The pattern is familiar. Factories that design and build things with AI are one of the missing pieces of a self-copying machine, the core of a von Neumann probe. Page has never linked Dynatomics to his galaxy plan, and we do not suggest he has. But it is consistent with a lifelong interest in machines that can do more of the work of making the world.

Page keeps his private life private, but his business moves have been widely reported. In December 2025, according to state filings reviewed by Fortune, his family office, Koop, was converted from a California company into a Delaware one, and other entities linked to him were moved too. The Wall Street Journal reported that he bought two waterfront properties in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami for about $173 million (Fortune).

The moves came ahead of a proposed one-time 5% tax on the wealth of California billionaires who were residents on January 1, 2026, which goes to a statewide vote on November 3, 2026. Page has not commented publicly on the moves. During the COVID-19 pandemic he lived in Fiji with his family, and in 2021 it was reported that he holds a residence visa for New Zealand (Wikipedia: Larry Page).

You do not have to share Page's vision to see where it points. If intelligence is mostly computation, and if a mind is a pattern rather than a particular lump of tissue, then the line between a person and a digital version of that person will keep getting thinner. Brain mapping is advancing faster than almost anyone predicted, and AI can already learn how a particular person talks, thinks and sounds. In our view, copying a human mind is a matter of when, not if.

Where we part ways with the version of Page in Musk's stories is control. A digital version of a person should belong to that person, and after they die, to the people they choose. Nobody else should be able to edit it, retrain it or put words in its mouth. That is not speciesism. It is consent.

That is why we built governance first. A Persona is an AI likeness of you built from your own memories and your own cloned voice, which your family can talk to and hear after you die. Executor Lock™, our patent-pending technology, passes control of your Persona to the executor you name, and no third party can ever edit, retrain or impersonate your Persona. Idy® has 78 patents pending, with international protection sought under the Patent Cooperation Treaty, covering consent, verified death, the handover to a named executor, the permanent memory snapshot behind Executor Lock™, and keeping a Persona the same person when AI models change. Building is free: 25 memories, no card, and your free build never expires. Paid plans start at US$14.99 a month.

This page is part of our series on the people and the science behind the race to outlive the body.

• Digital Immortality: Larry Page and the Race to Upload Minds: the story that started it, and how close we are to copying a mind.

• What Is a Von Neumann Probe? Larry Page's Galaxy Plan: the self-copying spacecraft at the center of Page's plan.

• Why Larry Page Called Elon Musk a Speciesist: the argument Musk says led to OpenAI.

• Mind Uploading in 2026: How Close Are We?: how close science is to copying a human brain.

• What Is a Connectome? Every Brain Mapped So Far: the brain's wiring diagram, and every brain mapped so far.

• The Billionaires Trying to Live Forever: who is spending what on longevity and digital immortality.

• How to Live Forever: Every Way People Are Trying: every approach, from medicine to mind uploading.

• Cryonics in 2026: Cost, How It Works, Who Signed Up: what it costs, how it works and who has signed up.

Page's own words come from his October 2000 interview, as reported by Fortune, his 2007 AAAS talk, as reported by OfficeChai, and his 2014 TED interview, as reported by the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Accounts of his views come from Fortune, Yahoo News, Reuters via BNN Bloomberg, The Builders and X.

Biography, Calico and Kurzweil come from Wikipedia on Larry Page, Calico and Ray Kurzweil. His current work and moves come from TechCrunch, The Real Deal and Fortune. We checked every source on October 30, 2026.

Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mustafa Suleyman, Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil and the companies named on this page have no connection to Afterlife.ai™, and nothing on this page suggests that any of them uses or endorses our service.