If I could give a six word response for the technical side: "Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat and team".
To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot remember, he said that the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and their team have time and time again managed to design and build state-of-the-art, qualitatively different solutions (MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner). And now their team's attention is on AI...
To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot remember, he said that the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and their team have time and time again managed to design and build state-of-the-art, qualitatively different solutions (MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner). And now their team's attention is on AI...
2016 (might be more recent ones) update on AI at Google http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/3/16/jeff-dean-on-large...
Video of full lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSaZGT4-6EY
EDIT: Sanjay Ghemawat and Jeff are like the dynamic duo of large scale systems engineering.