The work that Jeff Dean and colleagues at Google are doing is pretty mind blowing [1]. Sometimes, I feel that you need Google's scale of problems to be forced to push technology that way.

The joke at my company is that everytime Google publishes about one of their technology on a paper, they already have a next-gen version of it running internally.

[1]: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2013/08/learning-meani...