Ali Eslami

I see my role as being one of a surfer where I have to be leaning just enough into the future to kind of make forward progress, but not too far that I fall into like the abyss.

Right, yeah.

So if you've used Google Search, you will have seen something called AI mode, where you can kind of have a conversation with AI about the thing you're searching for.

That started off about two years ago, I think now, where we had Gemini, which was our LLM,

And you may not remember, but back then these AIs, they weren't really connected to the internet.

So you could ask them questions, but you couldn't ask them about local restaurants or recent news.

So yeah, we built this prototype that we called Neural Google, as in like, how can we make Google like a neural network?

And we connected Gemini to Google Search.

And that has now, you know, been rolled out and many people have used it.

Yeah, so I was involved in kind of creating that.

Right, yeah, I forgot about that.

That was a long, long time ago.

Yeah, so I fell in love with computing when I was a teenager, like playing video games like so many other people, and learned how to code when I was in my teens, and went on to actually study AI during my undergrad, which was super uncommon back then.

So in 2005, I did an undergrad in AI.

And yeah, I applied to work at Google, and due to my nationality, I'm from Iran, I was told that there were some restrictions to Iranians working at Google.

That didn't work out.

So I went on, worked at a games company, then I did a PhD, worked at Microsoft, and in 2014-15 joined Google again.

Thankfully, the rules had changed, or they didn't realize.

I don't know what happened, but...

Yeah, I mean, that was one of the things that I found super attractive as a teenager.