Sundar Pichai
Appearances
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And part of why we are able to do that is because, you know, we train and serve our models on our infrastructure, including TPUs, right? And we are in our seventh generation of TPUs, and we built our first version in 2017. I remember talking about it at Google I.O. Probably people didn't pay attention to it because, like, you know, why are you building a specific machine learning X-rated chip?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Look, it plays out everywhere. To your earlier question on cost per query in search, The reason we feel comfortable we can serve it at that scale is because we are constantly innovating through each generation, including chips which are really, really good at inference. And Ironwood, which is our latest in our TPU series, a single pot of Ironwood is over 40 exaflops.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Right, and so the scale of these things are incredible. And we have thought about our info all the way from subsea cables to the scale at which we do infrastructure is unparalleled. And I've always viewed that full stack approach. deep infrastructure, foundation, fundamental R&D on top of it, and then you build and innovate on top of that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And I think that approach will serve us well over time, but it really empirically plays out in the cost at which we are able to provide our models. Part of the reason we've had a lot of traction with Gemini 2.5 series is not only are they great models, but we are offering it at a very attractive value. And we can do that because we are driving our infrastructure costs down.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
On the $75 billion in CapEx for 2025, obviously majority of that goes into servers, data centers, and so on, servers being the vast portion of it. I would say on looking at 2025 and looking at the compute part of the span, Half of that is going towards our cloud business in 2025. And obviously, it's a very different business to search and so on.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
So a lot of it is to power the innovations from Google DeepMind, pushing the frontier. And we're doing it across many dimensions, not just large language models, but even there doing it across not just text, images, video, et cetera, building world models, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
So there's just a lot of innovation which we are pushing on the frontier, obviously to support our core products like Search, YouTube, Gemini, et cetera. But 50% of the compute goes to its Google Cloud.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Look, first of all, at a high level, NVIDIA is a phenomenal company. Jensen is awesome. We have been working with NVIDIA now for a very, very long time, and we continue to do so. And we serve a lot of the Gemini traffic on GPUs as well. And so we give customers choice, et cetera. Internally, we train our Gemini models on TPUs, and we serve it that way across our products. But we use both.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And I do think, look, I do think everyone in the industry is going to try and do something like that. But, you know, it's, you know, NVIDIA is R&D and their ability to drive that innovation. Their software stack is world class. So, you know, they have a lot of advantages as a company and I have extraordinary respect for them.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
But we've always had, we are committed, we are actually deploying GPUs internally as well. I think I like that flexibility, but we are also long-term committed to the TPU direction as well. So I think it's a good combination to have both. And I think we push each other and drive the frontier forward.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I think maybe it was Andrej Karpathy who used the term AJI, which is like he called it artificial jagged intelligence, right? So I think the progress is not going to be always smooth, right? Like you go through these periods, it looks like something slow, and then you see a paradigm breakthrough, et cetera. And it's been going like that for a while.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
No, look, I mean, I love building products. And in some ways, Google was really set up, I think the founders set up this kind of a deep computer science approach. And you take that and apply it to build things which can impact people on a day-to-day basis. And so it's that kind of a product and technical culture, which is the essence of the company. So I love doing that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I think obviously over the last couple of years, you know, all of us scaled up on pre-training and then there was a lot of momentum with post-training and then with inference compute and now, you know, this progress with how do you take all that and stitch together in agentic workflows and, you know, and so on. So I do think there's a lot of progress and it feels pretty continuous to me, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I think it's both true progress gets harder which I think will distinguish the elite teams, at least on the foundational side. I think that might be a factor. I felt the heart of the problem is, I think we are well set up for that. I think we are well set up for that. I do think we are pushing the research frontier in a much broader way than most other people.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Recently, we are testing it in labs, this whole new dedicated AI experience called AI Mode coming to Search.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
beyond just LLMs, transformer-based models, diffusion-based models, all those areas we are exploring in a deep, deep way. And there's always the chance that we may reach a point where you quite don't get that returns to the additional compute you're going to put in. But I quite haven't seen it yet, right? The progress looks maybe harder because you're now dealing with a lot more compute.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
So you're really running into the loss of like, can I actually get as many electricians as I can to build the data centers at the speed, you know, all that stuff. But I haven't seen, or at least talking to our researchers, haven't seen anything fundamentally, hey, like we are not going to be able to move past at this point or something like that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I think we have the opportunity to create much better experiences for people. I think people use products like Gmail, Calendar, Docs, YouTube, Search, et cetera. So with their permission, taking that personal context into account, I think we can deliver much better experiences. We are working on that, but it's something on which we have to deliver.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
But I view that as one of the differentiated innovation opportunities we have ahead as a company, but it's something we are thoughtfully working on. We'll make progress there.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
It's a great question. I do think, you know, the answer has got to be, you know, we've always, humans have adapted to computing and it's always been that way. But over time, the answer will be that you need to do less of the hard work, less of the adaptation and computing kind of works for you, right? And that's the holy grail, I think. And And we are making progress, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Be it touch, be it voice, everything inches us towards this future. For example, when I wear AR glasses, I already wear glasses. It's not that, you know, but the AR glasses aren't quite as comfortable as my normal glasses, but they're getting there. It's obvious to me that that'll push it to the next level of seamlessness where it kind of is ambiently there and doing stuff for you.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
So I think that's the arrow, the arrow of how it'll, it has to be more seamless and just be there for you. Will it be like neural link down the line, right? Like when I wanna understand something, is it that seamless, right? I think all of that is a possibility. But I think in the immediate world, given you're going to have really natively multimodal models, which can take,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
you know, audio, vision, language, all of that, and be there in your line of view. So I think when AR really works, I think that'll wow people. I'm not talking about immersive displays, I'm talking more about AR glasses, right? And I think that paradigm looks very interesting to me having used it. You can kind of feel that next leap, right, where I think we'll all enjoy using it in a way.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And there's not a single week which goes by where I feel like I don't get to do that. So those are the parts I really enjoy. But obviously, running a company of this scale where you impact so many people, I think it's a privilege. So enjoyed every part of it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
but you still have a little bit of system integration challenges to work through. So we have maybe a couple cycles away to get to that sweet spot, what smartphones were in around 2006, 2007. So, but maybe that's the next leap, right? And so probably that's what's exciting for me.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Yes, right, I think. We are definitely excited about, be they our glasses, the next form factors, you know, Robotics is another area, all that. And we obviously build Pixel phones. We build vast data centers. So we are definitely in the physical world. You can think of Waymo as a big robot. We are driving around everywhere. So we're making, with our partners, cars that way. So definitely, yes.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
They are obviously fortunate to have both of them involved in their own unique ways deeply. I talk to them all the time. I think both Larry and Sergey, credit to them. They always envision where AI would be. I think their ability to understand trends and You know, I swear I've had conversations maybe as early as like 15, 20 years ago about moments like this with them.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I think they both would argue that this is the most exciting time in the field, you know, and they both engage in their own ways. I think Sergey is definitely spending time with the Gemini team in a pretty hardcore way, like sitting and coding and spending time with the engineers.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And that gives the energy to the team, which I think it's unparalleled to have a founder sitting there looking at loss curves, giving feedback on model architectures. How can we improve post-training, et cetera? I think it's a rare, rare place to be. But my favorite conversations are sometimes when the three of us sit and talk. The combination of, I mean, they're very non-linear thinkers.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
So I feel like it expands the conversation into ways which you always don't expect. And out of it, which comes interesting ideas. So I think I always have access to that. But I think I've worked with them for such a long time. There is friendship, respect, mutual dialogue. We love doing that. And I think I'll always have that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I'm obviously very, very familiar with the concept. I don't think I've read the book actually, but it's one of those things which is so much in the ether, you think you know it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Look, it's obviously by definition, it's a very impressive group, right? And I think you're talking about some of the best companies, some of the best entrepreneurs, all that. Look, it shows both how much progress we are going to see because you're basically talking about many people who are working hard to drive that progress.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
So to the earlier question, when you were talking about, are we going to see progress? The answer has got to be yes, because of the unique types of people here pushing progress, right? Look, each of them, they're different people. I am fortunate to know all of them. And I think maybe only one of them has invited me to a dance, not the others, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
But I just look, I spent time with Elon maybe two weeks ago when I talked to him and his ability to build future technologies into existence. I think it's just unparalleled. So like, look, these are phenomenal people. I respect all of them. You know, there's partnerships involved, there's competition involved, but...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
If I were to step back and say, at the end of the day, I love driving technology progress in a way that impacts people positively. When you think about areas like healthcare and other important areas, education, we are now talking about this is why AI is so profound. So the opportunity is what excites me. I think all of us are going to do well in this scenario. That's how I think about it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
when the internet happened, Google wasn't even around. So the other thing you can say is, there are companies we don't even know, haven't been started yet, their names aren't known. might be extraordinarily big winners in the AI thing, right? So it's going to be, AI is a much bigger landscape, opportunity landscape than all the previous technologies we have known. Combined. Combined.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And so, you know, so which is why I think it's all about, you know, the companies which will end up doing well are, you will do well because you're able to innovate and execute with the best talent. That ends up being the driver.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Look, I think the main moment from DeepSeek was... Look, always, if you follow the AI research and scan through papers and read them, nobody who does that would underestimate China. When you look at the amount of research output from China, they have extraordinary talent.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
But I do think all of us had to adjust our priors a little bit after the deep-seek moment, which was like, well, they are even closer to the frontier than most people maybe assume. And so I think there was a moment. I think internally for us, I think externally people are very impressed and rightfully so with how efficient their models were.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Interestingly for us internally, we benchmarked it to Flash and Flash was as efficient or you could argue in some ways better. So I think to our earlier conversations, I do think this is more maybe internal baseball for us.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
We were benchmarking and saying, look, it's good to see, because they had to work in a hardware constrained way, I think, which is what drove a lot of their innovations and efficiency improvements. And so I was pleased with that. But it tells you that the frontier is evolving rapidly. There are more players closer to it than people fully realize.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And it's going to be a very dynamic moment in the industry. I think China will be very, very competent on the AI frontier is just what I always assumed.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Well, look, you're definitely hitting on what is When you look at any system, you want to find where the constraint is because that's what locates the whole system, and you are rightfully identifying the most likely constraint for AI progress, and hence, by definition, GDP growth and all that stuff. I do worry about it a lot.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
The answers are sometimes you run into challenges which you have to solve. You're running into physics barriers or something like that. This is not a problem like that. We already know the technologies that can work to supply the demand we need. So it's more to me an execution challenge, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I would phrase the energy problem as it's obviously multifaceted, but I think be it really embracing, we shouldn't have innovators dilemma in the energy sector, right? So we should lean into all the possible innovations ahead. And there are many of them, obviously, first of all, People perpetually, I think, will underestimate solar, right? You know, solar plus batteries will end up being huge.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
You know, obviously the amount of innovation that's going into nuclear, geothermal, all of that are opportunities to embrace and more, I'm not mentioning. But I think, you know, upgrading the grid, you know, solving for transmission, you know, permitting to make all of that progress faster. And then actually I think we may be workforce constrained, like, you know, to my earlier point, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
You know, I think we are all, if you look at the number of electricians leaving the workforce, versus suddenly all of us, and you project out this demand, there's a huge mismatch, right? So literally how do you make sure there is incentives and workforce development to address shortages like that? over the next decade will end up being important policies.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I think we are fortunate, you know, people like Secretary Wright and Secretary Burgum, I mean, they are very, I think, deeply aware of the issue, and I think they are hitting the problem hard. But I definitely think it's solvable, but I think we all have to put our mind towards it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
No, I wouldn't say that, right? Like just for example, we are supply constrained this year in our cloud business, right? And when we are, all of us are simultaneously looking to scale up data centers, right? So we are running into real constraints. The way the constraints play out today is delays in projects because of permitting. or not having access to electricians.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
All of that is realities all of us are dealing with. So if this trend line continues, the pace at which we are all ramping up, and obviously for it to continue, we all have to generate the returns on it, and so it has to really impact the economy in a more substantive way so that they go hand in hand. If the trend continues, these constraints will be much more visible, I think.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Today, we are all working through these constraints. So, I think there are real constraints today, but I expect it to, for us to be competitive with China, et cetera, I think we have to solve these constraints in the near future.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
The way I've assumed is the U.S. is always, there's never been a time where U.S. just doesn't meet these moments, right? So to me, I look at it and say, it just means that the capitalist solutions will innovate through this moment, right? That's why people are working hard to build SMRs and nuclear fusion, et cetera. So I've kind of assumed we will meet that moment.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And if we don't, or if the lines don't match, I think the conversations will get louder and louder till we meet the moment. That's the way I internalize it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
It's a good framework, good question to talk about. I've definitely, for almost a decade, one of the first things I did was to think of the company as AI first. It was very clear to us. We had Google Brain underway in 2012. We acquired DeepMind in 2014. 2015, when I became the CEO, I said, look, the technology is really evolving.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
By the way, we are doing the same patient approach in many other areas.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Quantum is one. So tell me about quantum.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Obviously, Quantum has gotten a lot more attention in the last 12 months or so, but we have been working, just like Waymo, we work through these things, whether there's attention from the outside or not, because we are working on these things out of conviction on the long-term trends, right? So it comes from those first principles.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
obviously the universe is fundamentally quantum, to do any kind of large scale simulations in a way that truly represent nature, you would need some versions of quantum computing. I think to me quantum feels like where AI was around 2015. So I would say in a five year timeframe
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
you would have that moment where a really useful practical computation is done in a quantum way, far superior to classical computers. And that'll be that aha moment, I think, which will really show the promise of the industry. I'm absolutely confident that we will get there when I see the progress and I can pattern match to progress in the other fundamental areas we have worked on.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
So it really doesn't feel like obviously, look, these are very challenging areas. You may hit a constraint. I do think a lot of people are making announcements in quantum. So in some ways it's tough to distinguish them. We had the same scenario in self-driving maybe three years ago. There were so many people doing self-driving. It looked like everyone was roughly the same, but they weren't.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I could internally tell the difference that how far ahead Waymo was. I feel that way about our quantum effort too. I think there are a lot of announcements, a lot of noise in the industry. There are a few good people, but I do think we are at the frontier there. And so, you know, I'm pretty excited about it in a three- to five-year timeframe. But we'll be patient and get there.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Look, we are committed to, you know, in almost all these cases, our goal would be to, you know, demonstrate more and more useful practical algorithms and show progress on that and give access to it through cloud, right? And... I think I always say it's tough to project innovation on top of a platform.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Nobody could say just because you had smartphones and GPS and payments, something like Uber would get invented. You couldn't linearly sit and project Uber from the underlying innovation. That's how the world works. For me, quantum is that foundational, again, just like AI, there's going to be extraordinary innovations on top of it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
The reason we were excited to approach our work as AI first is because we really felt that AI is what will drive the biggest progress in search. So, you know, I think even the last couple of years, I viewed this as an extraordinary opportunity for search.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
We are working on all of that too. I think we'll have more exciting moments to share this year. So look forward to making it happen.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
We are definitely, for robotics, you know, we again have probably, you know, one of the most advanced frontier R&D teams in the world now. You know, and the Gemini robotics efforts around vision, language, action, models, et cetera, are world class. I do think robotics, so we are now thinking through how we either partner or where we actually bring products out.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
You are right, we tried the application layer too early, where I think robotics wasn't really being influenced by AI as much. But now it's really the combination of AI plus robotics that gives that next sweet spot, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And so we are making plans there, nothing to share today, but you will see us make more announcements in the space, but we are definitely foundationally driving the underlying models and we are building state-of-the-art models there. We are working with partners and testing it. When I look at the progress of humanoid robots, et cetera, I mean, they are...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
In the past, I would say, well, this is obviously, you can see how janky they are. Now I have to take five seconds to look at it and say closely and say, is this fake or is this an actual robot doing it? Like already I'm in that moment. And so you can see the progress in the field underway. So I think we are probably two to three years away from that magical moment in robotics too.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I think if you look at how much information means to people, I think they're going to, each person is going to have access to information in a way they've never had before. So it feels very far from a zero-sum construct to me. And we are seeing it empirically when people are using search. Obviously there are a couple of major things we have done with search.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And so that's the next exciting phase.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Yeah, we have intrinsic. So one of our bets is effectively doing that. So supporting robotics manufacturers. We are committed to having the Gemini as a model You know, we'll take all modalities into account, work very, very well for robotics. It's definitely something we are committed to being on.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
How we actually bring products out, first party versus third party, et cetera, is where we are thinking.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Look, I think it's important to step back and say, you know, the underpinnings of a culture in which you really invest in employees and you empower them.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And even some of the perks was to create a culture where it's positive, optimistic, you're in an innovation mindset, people are talking to each other, maybe by giving lunch here, people are all sitting and talking ideas through lunch, you're cross-pollinating, imagine. So that is the thesis of it, not that we are trying to give lunch to people, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And so I, till today, feel we still get a lot of innovation in the company, at all levels of the company. And I think people wake up and say, well, I can go do this notebook alum, et cetera, are great examples, right? And so people do that all the time. So I think empowering employees, has been and is and will be a source of strength for Google.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I think we can attract higher caliber people who feel like they have agency to do that. But that doesn't mean, I think people shouldn't confuse that with, like today for example, you can take something like Google DeepMind, I think there is all the way from Demis and others, extraordinary leadership team, be it Cori, Jeff, Oriel, Noam, et cetera.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I think maybe only one of them has invited me to a dance, not the others. Biggest regret? Look, there are acquisitions we debated hard, came close. Just give me one name. We're going to get in trouble. Maybe Netflix. We just leaned into the user experience. And over time, we figured out monetization to follow.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
All these leaders have strong opinions on how to drive that frontier forward and that's happening too, right? So I think it's important to strike a balance between the two. I think when you empower employees a lot, in some ways, like we have allowed for more free speech than other companies, that's one way you can think about it. So you're gonna hear voices,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Sometimes you can hear like what is effectively 500 people in the company, but that doesn't represent the company as a whole. So in some ways we are different from other companies and can confuse it on the outside, I think. But I think overall, look, we have a clear sense of where we are going. I think we want to empower people all in the service of our mission.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
So if anything, you know, over the past few years, and you are right, there are moments, not just us, But as an industry, I think, I think some of the other things became more of the focus than the mission of the company and why we are all here, right? We are not all here in the company to resolve our personal differences or something. We are here because you're excited about
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
you know, innovating in the service of the mission of the company and the impact you can have. And so bringing that focus back, that's something I've been very deliberate about for the past few years. And I think it needs reinforcing. I think one of the lessons for me was we all grew so much that you assumed everyone always understood those underpinnings.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Transformers drove some of the biggest innovations in search with BERT and MUM, dramatically improved search quality. We launched AI overviews about a year ago. It's now being used by over one and a half billion users in over 150 countries. It's expanding the types of queries people can type in. And we see it empirically, the nature of queries is expanded.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
But then when you added so many people, you realize you have to go back and repeat that a lot to help people internalize that. We've done that and we do that all the time. I think moments like this help a lot too. The current moment is just genuinely both so exciting and so intense. It actually reminds me a lot of early Google.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
When I walk into the GDM building, some of our earliest engineers are all sitting there. working together, people come in five days a week at a minimum, right? And so you have that intensity and you have that excitement. And I feel that same sense of optimism. So that's what I'm focused on, right? To me, that's the hardcore-ness which matters, right? Like are people, smart people,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
really working with a passion. And that's where that intensity comes from. And you have to work hard to create that. And there are pockets of the company if that doesn't happen, you figure out what are the changes you need to make to do that. And sometimes, for example, I recreated the notion of labs. And because I said, well, there are things that are possible with 10 person teams.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And so we need to go and do that again. And there are quite a few projects, both we have shipping and are underway to come, which will be an outcome of those efforts as well. So your values are enduring, culture is something you're constantly tweaking to make sure you're true to your values. And so by definition, there's gonna be drift and you work hard to snap it back.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Oh, you know, for sure. Look, I think COVID was such a big distortion to our way of working, right? So fundamentally, Google was designed to be a culture in which people were seeing each other, engaging with each other. So losing that continuity, right, I think definitely impacted our culture.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
So when we have gotten people back in a 3-2 model, and some teams work beyond that, I think it's been important, I've spent time to get those connections back. Like for example, at GDM we were intentional in creating a physical space, where we can get all of them back in the same building, both in London, both in Mountain View.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And taking our newest building with that kind of a tent-like roof structure and putting all the people in and being intentional about it has made a massive difference.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
The talent market, we go through these fierce moments for talent. AI is one of them. Right. And whenever there are these Google, you know, obviously we are fortunate to have some of the most talented employees. So we are a source. I'm equally proud of the fact that I think Googlers have left to start over 2000 companies, right? And so, you know, there is a virtuous cycle.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I think people come back, we acquire companies. I think all of that keeps the company fresh, but in the current AI moment, Look, I think we are both holding on to critical talent. We are recruiting. I always look at the tip of the tree of, are we able to attract the best PhD researchers coming out of the top programs? And the answer is yes. And there are people who have left, who have come back.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And so I feel good about the position we are, but you work at it hard every week, every month, and so on.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
So there are whole new use cases coming into search. We find for queries where we trigger AI overviews, we see query growth, and the growth continues over time. Getting the feedback from AI overviews, recently we are testing it in labs. There's a whole new dedicated AI experience called AI Mode coming to Search. We'll speak about it more at Google I.O.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
There's a lot of potential to change. There's a part of me which feels maybe we've all misunderstood what colleges are about, and maybe colleges are about that community and people getting together and exchanging. So, you know, there may be intangibles, which still maybe make the, you know, it more valuable than like we all perceive it to be, but
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
But the way I think about it is you're gonna get extraordinary talent at more places around the world. So that's the way I think about it because people have access to with AI. So you don't need to be in a few certain places to be that great talent. So I think the nature of that changes. By the way, I think it's an important thing to internalize. We often talk about talent.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
We've always been able to recruit the best talent in the country. But now there's extraordinary talent emerging in other parts of the world too. So I think it's something not to lose line of sight. And maybe that's the way I would think about it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I'll answer it two ways straight. We are not a holding company in the sense that we are not just looking to invest capital in other attractive businesses. That's not who we are, right? We are, from a foundational technology basis, if we can take that technology and that R&D we do, and identify problems in which we can innovate and bring a differentiated value proposition, we'll do that, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
So that's the way we approach. And so the structure is an outcome of that, right? Which means you will have businesses on paper, they may look like very disparate, but there is a common strand underneath them, right? I mean, Waymo is going to keep getting better because of the same work we do in Gemini and AI over time as Google Cloud, to search, to YouTube, to isomorphic, to robotics, et cetera.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
So that is the unifying layer. And then it's a continuum. Is Google Cloud a Google business or an Alphabet business? We segment it out. And so the branding matters less, I think. We'll have a range of companies. Some of them will leave and IPO out because maybe that's the best way they can make progress. So all of that is a possibility. But what I think
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I, the founders, think about as like the underlying innovation by which, so we think of the units of quantum, right? You know, alpha fold and hence isomorphic, right? You know, self-driving and building the Waymo driver and hence all the businesses on top of it. So it's more, maybe that's how we think about it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Yeah, look, I think if anything, X over time, look, a lot of these innovations did come out of X, right? And so, including Waymo, the early incarnations of Google Brain, right? Yeah, so I think X as an incubator allows us to push the boundaries.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And in AI mode, you can have a full-on AI experience in search, including follow-on conversational queries. And we're bringing our cutting-edge models there, where the models are actually working to answer your questions using search as a real native tool. And there the queries, people are typing in queries, like literally long paragraphs, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
They're thinking about tapestries, thinking about the grid problem that are extraordinary, but it's all rooted in computer science, physics, kind of a deep technology R&D. And I think that's the foundation across everything we do.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Look, I think we have, as a company, I think there aren't that many companies which can push the technology frontier. Like you don't hear of companies winning Nobel prizes often. That level of foundational R&D we do and then apply it to create businesses and value. I think we have done an extraordinary job at that and we aspire to do that. I'm really proud of that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I think we're pretty unique as a company that way. There are a lot of small regrets. By nature, I tend to look forward and I learn from mistakes we make. But look, there are acquisitions we debated hard, came close, and some of them are- Just give me one name. or get in trouble, maybe Netflix, right? Like we debated Netflix at some point super intensely inside.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
So you go through these moments, right? And so I wouldn't call it regrets, but you always look back and like in a world of butterfly effects, there were alternate paths, but maybe they are in a different part of the multiverse.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Thanks, David. Real pleasure.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
The average query length is somewhere two to three times is what we see in search as it existed two years ago. So we are seeing people respond. In search is always from the outside, people look at it and say, search kind of looks easy to do. The craft of search is very hard. Over two decades, I think we've had a real North star of understanding what users want in search.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And you've been here, we are kind of a very metrics-driven company. We kind of know what works, users are our North Star. And empirically, we see that people are engaging more and using the product more, right? So all that. To your question about innovators' dilemma, I think, The dilemma only exists if you treat it as a dilemma, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Like, you know, say for me, all along in technology, you have these massive periods of innovation and you lean into it as hard as you can. It's the only way to do it. You know, when mobile came, everyone was like, well, you know, it's like, you're not going to have the real estate, like how will ads work, all that stuff. You know, mobile was a transition which ended up working great.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I can give great examples, right? Like TikTok has come in. YouTubers thrived since the moment TikTok has come in, right? And it was a whole new format. We did Shorts. When we launched Shorts, Shorts absolutely didn't monetize anywhere near long form. But we just leaned into the user experience and over time we figured out monetization to follow.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
So to me, you don't think about it as a dilemma because users, you have to innovate to stay ahead and you kind of lean in that direction.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
You know, in search, you know, Maybe the most widely used in AI product today might be search with AI overviews, right? People are using it intensely. Obviously, we have a standalone Gemini app. I think we are making progress there, particularly with the introduction of Gemini 2.5 Pro. We have seen a real uptake and engagement and usage growth in the product.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I'm going all in.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
We have a lot more to come just in the last, Few weeks, we have shipped deep research and updated Canvas, audio overviews. You can now go and do video generation with VO2 straight in the Gemini app on Android phones with Gemini Live. You can screen share. It can talk to what's on your screen. So there's a lot coming that way, and users are responding.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Look, ChatGPT has obviously had phenomenal success, but I think it's still early days and we are definitely seeing traction, seeing growth. To me, what matters is if you innovate, are users responding and using it more? That seems to be the case. It's in our hands to continue innovating. I think it's a fiercely competitive moment.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
But I would say across our products, people are coming and using and consuming information across search, using the Gemini model increasingly, in YouTube, in the Gemini app and so on. So I think it's a much broader view we have.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Look, this is something I think people are really worried about two years ago, but have always felt to the extent that something is about the cost of serving it, Google with its infrastructure, I'd wager on that, right? And on our chances to do that better than pretty much anyone else.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And we've actually seen for a given query, the cost to serve that query has fallen dramatically in an 18-month timeframe. What is probably more of a constraint is latency, I would say. So it's less the cost per query. I think our ability to serve the experience at the right latency, search has been near instant. So how do you think about that frontier has been more of a question.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
The cost per query is not what I think will end up, you know, I think we'll be able to, we've done the transition well. That's not a primary driver of how it'll impact things, yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
You know, we already with AI overviews, you know, we are at the baseline of, you know, it's the same as without AI overviews. And so we've reached that stage. But from there, we can improve, right? And I think... I've always felt the reason ads have worked well in search is because commercial information is also information.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
People, when they have that intent, are looking for that most relevant information. I don't see any reason why AI, just from a first principle standpoint, why won't AI do a better job there as well? And so I think we are comfortable that we can work the transition through. Some of it may take time, but all indicators are that we'll be able to do it well. Over time. Over time.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
But it's already AI overviews. When we show ads, we've kind of reached the baseline.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I didn't quite realize that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Two things. I mean, the main, it's a moment of acceleration, right? So if anything, The good thing about these moments is you don't even have a lot of time to think about some of those questions. I think a lot about making sure we have the best models. We are pushing the frontier as a company, and I think the last few months have shown the breadth and range of what we are doing.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
We are there, and we have to continue to stay there. So for me, you think and you worry a lot more about execution from within, that's all. Are we executing? Are we moving fast? Are we innovating? And I think over the past 12 months, I think we've really picked up pace as a company to meet the moment. So that's where I do spend a lot of time.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Look, as a CEO, one of the first things I did in 2015, in addition to being AI first, was to really bet big on You know, we had great products like YouTube, we had Workspace and Cloud, but really turning them into robust businesses, right? As well as great products. Last year, we exited a combination of YouTube and cloud at $110 billion.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I think people don't internalize that Google is one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world now. And the largest media company. In some ways, right? And definitely, we're doing a podcast. I think we're the largest podcasting service in the world. And so I feel like as a company, we are set up well. For the first time, you have this cross-cutting technology.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Great to have you here, David. Look forward to it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
You're more than a podcaster, but you're very good at podcasting too.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
To our earlier point, thinking of us as a deep computer science company, what better technology than AI, which horizontally can impact all aspects of our business? Search, YouTube, cloud, Waymo, and the other new things we are doing. So it feels like an exciting time. So not a lot of what... You know, we've continued to do well in search. We are doing well in these other businesses.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
And so to me, it feels like, you know, one of the biggest opportunities ahead as a company too. I think the next decade ahead looks to me as exciting as the past decade, so.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
I think I respect the other stuff you've done as well.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
We can unpack both, right? Like where our CapEx is going, but on your first part, right? Like one of the ways, you know, we look at the Pareto frontier of performance and cost. Google literally is on the predator frontier. So we deliver the best models at the most cost-effective price point, right? Like, you know, and our flash series of models are a real workhorse in the industry, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Productivity is down in certain parts. And what is not clear to me is in the first two months, most of the people are already on projects in which they kind of know what they need to do. But, you know, the next phase which will kick in is where, let's say, you're designing next year's products and, you know, you're on a brainstorming phase. Things are more unstructured.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
How does that collaboration actually work? You know, that's a bit hard to understand and do. So we are trying to understand what works well and what doesn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And, you know, you kind of motivate people and you can achieve a lot that way, right? And so it often tends to work out that way. But have there been times like, you know, I lose it? Yeah, but, you know, maybe less often than others. And maybe over the years... Less and less so because I find it's not needed to achieve what you need to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Yeah, less often than not. I think people respond to that. They may do stuff to react to that, like what you actually want them to do the right thing. And so maybe there's a bit of like sports, I'm a sports fan in football coaches in soccer, that football, You know, people often talk about like man management, right? Great coaches too, right? I think there is an element of that in our lives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
How do you get the best out of the people you work with? You know, at times you're working with people who are so committed to achieving. If they've done something wrong, they feel it more than you do, right? So you treat them differently than, you know, occasionally there are people who you need to clearly let them know, like that wasn't okay or whatever it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
But I've often found that not to be the case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Also, sometimes the unspoken words, you know, people can sometimes see that, like, you know, you're unhappy without you saying it. And so sometimes the silence can deliver that message even more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Is this going to be a political answer? I will tell the truthful answer. So it's Messi. It is. You know, it's been interesting because my son is a big Cristiano Ronaldo fan. And so we've had to watch El Clasicos together, you know, with that dynamic in there. I so admire CR7s. I mean, I've never seen an athlete more committed to that kind of excellence. And so he's one of the all-time greats.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
But, you know, for me, Messi is it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
This is genius. I had the chance to see him a couple of weeks ago. He played in San Jose against the Quakes. So I went to see it, see the game. I was a fan on the, had good seats, knew where he would play in the second half, hopefully. And even at his age, just watching him when he gets the ball, that movement, you know, you're right, that special quality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
It's tough to describe, but you feel it when you see it. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
It's a great question. Look, many years ago, I think it might have been 2017 or 2018, I said at the time, AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It'll be more profound than fire or electricity. So I have to back myself. I still think that's the case. When you asked this question, I was thinking, well, do we have a recency bias, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Like in sports, it's very tempting to call the current person you're seeing the greatest player, right? And so is there a recency bias? And You know, I do think from first principles, I would argue AI will be bigger than all of those. I didn't live through those moments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
You know, two years ago, I had to go through a surgery, and then I processed that there was a point in time people didn't have anesthesia when they went through these procedures. At that moment, I was like, that has got to be the greatest invention humanity has ever done, right? So, look, we don't know what it is to have lived through those times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
But, you know, many of what you're talking about were kind of this general things which pretty much affected everything, you know, electricity or internet, etc. But I don't think we've ever dealt with the technology, both which is progressing so fast, becoming so capable. It's not clear what the ceiling is. And the main unique, it's recursively self-improving, right? It's capable of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And so the fact it is going, it's the first technology will kind of dramatically accelerate creation itself, like creating things, building new things, can improve and achieve things on its own, right? I think like puts it in a different league, right? And so, a different league. And so I think the impact it'll end up having will far surpass everything we've seen before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
obviously with that comes a lot of important things to think and wrestle with, but I definitely think that'll end up being the case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
alpha research or whatever it is right like you know and when when yeah you're right when when it can do novel self-directed research obviously for a long time we will have hopefully always humans in the loop and all that stuff and these are complex questions to talk about but yes i think the underlying technology you know i've said this like if you watched seeing alpha go start from scratch
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
be clueless and like become better through the course of a day, you know, like, you know, kind of like, kind of like, you know, really it hits you when you see that happen. Even our, like the VO3 models, if you sample the models when they were like 30% done and 60% done and looked at what they were generating and you kind of see how it all comes together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
It's kind of like, I would say, kind of inspiring, a little bit unsettling, right, as a human. So all of that is true, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I mean, most of it probably we don't know today, but like, you know, the one thing which we can tangibly start seeing now is, you know, obviously with the coding progress, you got a sense of it. It's going to be so easy to imagine, like thoughts in your head, translating that into things that exist. That'll be part of the package, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Like it's going to empower almost all of humanity to kind of express themselves Maybe in the past you could have expressed with words, but like you could kind of build things into existence, right? You know, maybe not fully today. We are at the early stages of vibe coding. You know, I've been amazed at what people have put out online with VO3, but it takes a bit of work, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
You have to stitch together a set of prompts, but all this is going to get better. The thing I always think about, this is the worst it'll ever be, right? Like at any given moment in time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Software creation. Are you creating a program, a piece of content to be shared with others? Yes. games down the line, all of that, like, just becomes infinitely more possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
No, I agree. Look, think about 40 years ago, maybe in the US, there were five people who could do what you were doing. Like, go do an interview, you know. But today, think about with YouTube and other products, et cetera, like, how many more people are doing it? So I think this is what technology does, right? Like when the internet created blogs, you know, you heard from so many more people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
So I think, but with AI, I think that number won't be in the few hundreds of thousands. It'll be tens of millions of people, maybe even a billion people. Like, putting out things into the world in a deeper way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
The only thing I may say is I do think like in a world in which there are two AI, I think people value and choose just like in chess. You and I would never watch Stockfish 10 or whatever and AlphaGo play against each other. Like it would be boring for us to watch. but Magnus Carlsen and Gukesh, that game would be much more fascinating to watch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
So it's tough to say, like one way to say is you'll have a lot more content. And so you will be listening to AI generated content because sometimes it's efficient, et cetera. But the premium experiences you value might be a version of like the human essence, wherever it comes through. Going back to what we talked earlier about watching Messi dribble the ball.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I don't know, one day I'm sure a machine will dribble much better than Messi. but I don't know whether it would evoke that same emotion in us. So I think that'll be fascinating to see.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Yeah. Look, YouTube enabled, I mean, you know this better than anyone else, it's enabled so many creators. There is no doubt in me that, like, we will enable more filmmakers than there have ever been, right? You're going to empower a lot more people So I think there is an expansionary aspect of this, which is underestimated, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I think it'll unleash human creativity in a way that hasn't been seen before. It's tough to internalize. The only way it is, if you brought someone from the 50s or 40s and just put them in front of YouTube, you know, I think it would blow their mind away. Similarly, I think we would get blown away by what's possible in a 10 to 20 year timeframe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
You know, I think it depends on what it is for. Like, Maybe if you look at movies today with CGI, there are great filmmakers. You still look at who the directors are and who use it. There are filmmakers who don't use it at all. You value that. There are people who use it incredibly. Think about somebody like a James Cameron, what he would do with these tools in his hands.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
But I think there'll be a lot more content created. Just like writers today use Google Docs and not think about the fact that they're using a tool like that. Like, people will be using the future versions of these things. Like, it won't be a big deal at all to them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
It's a great question. You mentioned Darren. He's a clear visionary. Part of the reason we started working with him early on Veo is he's one of those
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
people who's able to kind of see that future get inspired by it and kind of showing the way for how creative people can express themselves with it look i think when it comes to allowing artistic free expression as one of the most important values in a society right i think you know artists have always been the ones to push push boundaries expand the frontiers of thought and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And so, look, I think that's going to be an important value we have. So I think we will provide tools and put it in the hands of artists for them to use and put out their work. Those APIs, I mean, I almost think of that as infrastructure. Just like when you provide electricity to people or something, you want them to use it and you're not thinking about the use cases on top of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
It's a paintbrush. Yeah. And so I think that's how, obviously, there have to be some things and society needs to decide at a fundamental level what's okay, what's not. we'll be responsible with it. But I do think, you know, when it comes to artistic free expression, I think that's one of those values we should work hard to defend.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I think one of the good insights here has been as the models are getting more capable, the models are really good at this stuff, right? And so I think in some ways, maybe a year ago, the models weren't fully there. So they would also do stupid things more often. And so you're trying to handle those edge cases, but then you make a mistake in how you handle those edge cases and it compounds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
But I think with 2.5, what we particularly found is once the models cross a certain level of intelligence and sophistication, You know, they are able to reason through these nuanced issues pretty well. And I think users really want that, right? Like, you know, you want as much access to the raw model as possible, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
But I think it's a great area to think about, like, you know, over time, you know, we should allow more and more closer access to it. Maybe, obviously, let people custom prompts if they wanted to and like, you know, and, you know, experiment with it, etc., I think that's an important direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
But look, the first principles we want to think about it is, you know, from a scientific standpoint, like making sure the models, and I'm saying scientific in the sense of like how you would approach math or physics or something like that. From first principles, having the models reason about the world, be nuanced.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
et cetera, you know, from the ground up is the right way to build these things, right? Not like some subset of humans kind of hard coding things on top of it. So I think it's the direction we've been taking and I think you'll see us continue to push in that direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And it truly could be life-changing. Oh, it is. Look, you know, I had the same feeling about search many, many years ago. You know, you definitely... You know, this tokens per month is like grown 50 times in the last 12 months.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Yeah, it is. It is. It is accurate. I'm glad it got it right. But, you know, that number was 9.7 trillion tokens per month 12 months ago. It's gone up to 480. It's a 50x increase. So there's no limit to human curiosity, and I think it's one of those moments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Maybe, I don't think it is there today, but maybe one day there's a five-word phrase which says what the actual universe is or something like that and something very meaningful, but I don't think we are quite there yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
You know, it's a cherished MicroKitchen conversation. Once in a while I have it, you know, like when Demis is visiting or, you know, if Demis, Korai, Jeff, Noam, Sergey, a bunch of our people, like, you know, we sit and, you know, talk about this, right? And Look, we see a lot of headroom ahead, right? I think we've been able to optimize and improve on all fronts, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Pre-training, post-training, test time compute. tool use, right, over time, making these more agentic. So getting these models to be more general world models in that direction, like VO3, you know, the physics understanding is dramatically better than what VO1 or something like that was. So you kind of see on all those dimensions, I feel, you know, progress is very obvious to see.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And I feel like there is significant headroom More importantly, you know, I'm fortunate to work with some of the best researchers on the planet, right? They think there is more headroom to be had here. And so I think we have an exciting trajectory ahead. It's tougher to say, you know, each year I sit and say, okay, we are going to throw 10x more compute over the course of next year at it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And like, will we see progress? Sitting here today, I feel like the year ahead will have a lot of progress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I think it's compute limited in this sense, right? Like, you know, we can all, part of the reason you've seen us do flash, nano flash and pro models, but not an ultra model. It's like for each generation, We feel like we've been able to get the pro model at like, I don't know, 80, 90% of Ultra's capability. But Ultra would be a lot more slow and a lot more expensive to serve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
But what we've been able to do is to go to the next generation and make the next generation's pro as good as the previous generation's ultra, but be able to serve it in a way that it's fast and you can use it and so on. So I do think scaling laws are working, but it's tough to get at any given time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
The models we all use the most is maybe like a few months behind the maximum capability we can deliver. right? Because that won't be the fastest, easiest to use, etc.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
There's one other term we should throw in there. I don't know who used it first. Maybe Karpathy did. AJI. Have you heard AJI? The artificial jagged intelligence? Sometimes feels that way, right? Both there are progress and you see what they can do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And then like you can trivially find they make numeric letters or like, you know, counting R's in strawberry or something which seems to trip up most models or whatever it is, right? So... So maybe we should throw that term in there. I feel like we are in the AGI phase where like dramatic progress, some things don't work well, but overall, you know, you're seeing lots of progress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
But if your question is, will it happen by 2030? Look, we constantly move the line of what it means to be AGI. There are moments today, you know, like sitting in a Waymo in a San Francisco street with all the crowds and the people and kind of work its way through. I see glimpses of it there. The car is sometimes kind of impatient, trying to work its way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Using Astra, like in Gemini Live, or asking questions about the world. What's this skinny building doing in my neighborhood? It's a streetlight, not a building. You see glimpses. That's why I use the word AGI because then you see stuff which obviously, you know, we are far from AGI too. So you have both experiences simultaneously happening to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I'll answer your question, but I'll also throw out this. I almost feel the term doesn't matter. What I know is by 2030, there'll be such dramatic progress. will be dealing with the consequences of that progress, both the positives, both the positive externalities and the negative externalities that come with it in a big way by 2030. So that I strongly feel, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Whatever, we may be arguing about the term or maybe Gemini can answer what that moment is in time in 2030, but I think the progress will be dramatic, right? So that I believe in. Will the AI think it has reached AGI by 2030? I would say we will just fall short of that timeline, right? So I think it'll take a bit longer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
It's amazing in the early days of Google DeepMind in 2010, they talked about a 20-year timeframe to achieve AGI, which is kind of fascinating to see. But for me, the whole thing, seeing what Google Brain did in 2012, and when we acquired DeepMind in 2014, right close to where we are sitting in 2012,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
You know, Jeff Dean showed the image of when the neural networks could recognize a picture of a cat, right, and identify it. You know, this is the early versions of brain, right? And so, you know, we all talked about a couple of decades. I don't think we'll quite get there by 2030. So my sense is it's slightly after that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
But I would stress it doesn't matter, like, what that definition is, because... you will have mind-blowing progress on many dimensions. Maybe AI can create videos. We have to figure out as a society, how do we, we need some system by which we all agree that this is AI generated and we have to disclose it in a certain way because how do you distinguish reality otherwise?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Oh, hugely so. There are simple UI innovations that, which have changed the world, right? And I absolutely think so. We will see a lot more progress in the next couple of years as I think AI itself on a self-improving track for UI itself. Like, you know, today we are like constraining the models. The models can't quite express themselves in terms of the UI to people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
But that is like, you know, if you think about it, we've kind of boxed them in that way. but given these models can code, they should be able to write the best interfaces to express their ideas over time, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
These models are natively multimodal. They can easily take content from any format, put it in any format. They can write a good user interface. They probably understand your preferences better over time. Like, you know, and so all this is like the evolution ahead, right? And so that goes back to where we started the conversation. Like, I think there'll be dramatic evolutions in the years ahead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Maybe one more kitchen question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Look, I mean, for sure. Look, I've both been very excited about AI, but I've always felt... This is a technology, you know, you have to actively think about the risks and work very, very hard to harness it in a way that it all works out well. On the PDoom question, look, you know, I wouldn't surprise you to say that's probably another MicroKitchen conversation that pops up once in a while, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
given how powerful the technology is, maybe stepping back, you know, when you're running a large organization, if you can kind of align the incentives of the organization, you can achieve pretty much anything, right? Like, you know, if you can get kind of people all marching in towards like a goal in a very focused way, in a mission-driven way, you can pretty much achieve anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
but it's very tough to organize all of humanity that way. But I think if PDOM is actually high, at some point, all of humanity is like aligned in making sure that's not the case, right? And so we'll actually make more progress against it, I think. So the irony is, so there is a self-modulating aspect there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Like I think if humanity collectively puts their mind to solving a problem, whatever it is, I think we can get there. So because of that, I think I'm optimistic on the PDoom scenarios, but that doesn't mean, I think the underlying risk is actually pretty high, but I have a lot of faith in humanity kind of rising up to meet that moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I agree with you. I think it's insightful. Look, I felt... Like to make progress on some of the toughest problems would be good to have AI like pair helping you. Right. And, and like, you know, so that resonates with me for sure. Yeah. Quick pause, Beth and break. Let's do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
My hope was like, can you imagine like the US president and the Chinese president being able to do something like Beam with the live meat translation working well. So they're both sitting and talking, make progress a bit more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
It's one of the toughest products. You can't quite describe it to people, even when we show it in slides, etc. You don't know what it is. You have to kind of experience it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
There's nothing like it. You're in the trenches, and you do form bonds that way, for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Oh, it is. And obviously we'll work hard over the years to make it more and more accessible. But yeah, even on a personal front, outside of work meetings, you know, a grandmother who's far away from our grandchild and being able to, you know, have that kind of an interaction, right? All of that, I think will end up being
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
nothing substitutes being in person you know it's not always possible you know you could be a soldier deployed trying to talk to your loved ones so I think you know so that's what inspires us when you and I hung out last year and took a walk
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Look, I mean, lots to unpack. You know, obviously, Like, I mean, the main bet I made as a CEO was to really, you know, make sure the company was approaching everything in a AI first way, really, you know, setting ourselves up to develop AGI responsibly, right? And make sure we're putting out products, which embodies that, things that are very, very useful for people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
So look, I knew even through moments like that last year, I had a good sense of what we were building internally. So I'd already made many important decisions, bringing together teams of the caliber of Brain and DeepMind and setting up Google DeepMind. There were things like we made the decision to invest in TPUs 10 years ago. So we knew we were scaling up and building big models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Anytime you're in a situation like that, A few aspects. I'm good at tuning out noise, right? Separating signal from noise. Do you scuba dive? Like, have you? No. It's amazing. Like, I'm not good at it, but I've done it a few times. But sometimes you jump in the ocean. It's so choppy. but you go down one feet under, it's the calmest thing in the entire universe, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
So there's a version of that, right? Like, you know, running Google, You know, you may as well be coaching Barcelona or Real Madrid, right? Like, you know, give a bad season. So there are aspects to that. But, you know, like, look, I'm good at tuning out the noise. I do watch out for signals. You know, it's important to separate the signal from the noise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
So there are good people sometimes making good points outside. So you want to listen to it. You want to take that feedback in. But, you know, internally, like, you know, you're making a set of consequential decisions, right? As leaders, you're making a lot of decisions. Many of them are like inconsequential. Like it feels like, but over time you learn that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Most of the decisions you're making on a day-to-day basis doesn't matter. Like you have to make them and you're making them just to keep things moving. But you have to make a few consequential decisions, right? And weird set up the... Right teams, right leaders. We had world-class researchers. We were training Gemini.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Internally, there are factors which were, for example, outside people may not have appreciated. I mean, TPUs are amazing, but we had to ramp up TPUs too. That took time, right? And to scale actually having enough TPUs to get the compute needed. But I could see internally the trajectory we were on. And I was so excited internally about the possibility.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
To me, this moment felt like one of the biggest opportunities ahead for us as a company. That the opportunity space ahead over the next decade, next 20 years is bigger than what has happened in the past. And I thought we were set up like better than most companies in the world. to go realize that vision.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Look, we were fortunate to have two world-class teams, but you're right. It's like somebody coming and telling you, take Stanford and MIT and then put them together and create a great department, right? And easier said than done. But we were fortunate, you know, phenomenal teams. Both had their strengths, you know, they were run very differently, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Like Brain was kind of a lot of diverse projects, bottoms up, and out of it came a lot of important research breakthroughs. DeepMind at the time had a strong vision of how you want to build AGI, and so they were pursuing their direction. But I think through those moments, luckily tapping into, you know, Jeff had expressed a desire to go back to more of a scientific perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
individual contributor routes. You know, he felt like management was taking up too much of his time. And Demis naturally, I think, you know, was running DeepMind and was a natural choice there. But I think it was, you're right, you know, it took us a while to bring the teams together. Credit to Demis, Jeff, Korai, all the great people there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
They worked super hard to combine the best of both worlds when you set up that team. a few sleepless nights here and there as we put that thing together. We were patient in how we did it so that it works well for the long term, right? And some of that in that moment, I think, yes, with things moving fast, I think you definitely felt the pressure, but I think we pulled off that transition well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And, you know, I think, you know, they've obviously doing incredible work. And there's a lot more incredible things I had coming from that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Probably, you know, probably, right? I think in the sense that, you know, there was a moment where we were all driving hard, but when you're in the trenches working with passion, you're going to have days, right? You disagree, you argue, but like all that, I mean, just part of the course of working intensely, right? And, you know, at the end of the day,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
All of us are doing what we are doing because the impact it can have. We are motivated by it. It's like, you know, for many of us, this has been a long-term journey. And so it's been super exciting. The positive moments far outweigh the kind of stressful moments. Just early this year, I had a chance to celebrate back-to-back over two days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
like, you know, Nobel Prize for Jeff Fenton and the next day a Nobel Prize for Demis and John Jumper. You know, you worked with people like that. All that is super inspiring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
To my earlier point about consequential decisions you make, there are decisions you make people can disagree pretty vehemently. But at some point, like, you know, you make a clear decision and you just ask people to commit, right? Like, you know, you can disagree. But it's time to disagree and commit so that we can get moving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And whether it's putting the foot down or, you know, like, you know, it's a natural part of what all of us have to do. And, you know, I think you can do that calmly and be very firm in the direction you're making the decision. And I think if you're clear, actually, people over time respect that, right? Like, you know, if you can make decisions with clarity, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I find it very effective in meetings where you're making such decisions to hear everyone out. I think it's important when you can to hear everyone out. Sometimes what you're hearing actually influences how you think about and you're wrestling with it and making a decision. Sometimes you have a clear conviction and you state, so look, I, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
this is how I feel and this is my conviction and you kind of place the bet and you move on. Are there big decisions like that? I'm kind of intuitively assume the merger was the big one. I think that was a very important decision for the company to meet the moment. I think we had to make sure we were doing that and doing that well. I think that was a consequential decision.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
There were many other things. We set up an AI infrastructure team like to really go meet the moment to scale up the compute we needed to, and really brought teams from disparate parts of the company, kind of created it to move forward.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
You know, bringing people, like getting people to kind of work together physically, both in London with DeepMind and what we call Gradient Canopy, which is where the Mountain View, Google DeepMind teams are. But one of my favorite moments is I routinely walk multiple times per week to the Grady and Canopy building where our top researchers are working on the models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Sergey is often there amongst them, right? Just looking at getting an update on the model, seeing the loss curve. So all that, I think the cultural part of getting the teams together back with that energy, I think it ended up playing a big role too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Look, you know, in some ways when mobile came, you know, people wanted answers to more questions. So we're kind of constantly evolving it. But you're right, this moment, you know, that evolution, because the underlying technology is becoming much more capable. You know, you can have AI give a lot of context, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
But one of our important design goals, though, is when you come to Google search, you're going to get a lot of context, but you're going to go and find a lot of things out on the web. So that will be true in AI mode, in AI overviews and so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
But I think to our earlier conversation, we are still giving you access to links, but think of the AI as a layer which is giving you context, summary, maybe in AI mode, you can have a dialogue with it back and forth on your journey. Right. And, but through it all, you're kind of learning what's out there in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
So those core principles don't change, but I think AI mode allows us to push the, we have our best models there, right? Models which are using search as a deep tool. Really for every query you're asking, kind of fanning out, doing multiple searches, Like kind of assembling that knowledge in a way so you can go and consume what you want to, right? And that's how we think about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
No, it is. I mean, the multimodality, the translation, its ability to reason, We are dramatically improving tool use. So putting that power in the flow of search, I think, look, I'm super excited with AI overviews. We've seen the product has gotten much better. We measured using all kinds of user metrics. It's obviously driven strong growth of the product. And we've been testing AI mode
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
It's now in the hands of millions of people. And the early metrics are very encouraging. So look, I'm excited about this next chapter of search. For people who are not thinking through or are aware of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Two things, early part of AI mode, we'll obviously focus more on the organic experience to make sure we are getting it right. I think the fundamental value of ads are, it enables access to deploy the services to billions of people. Second is ads are, the reason we've always taken ads seriously is we view ads as commercial information, but it's still information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And so we bring the same quality metrics to it. I think with AI mode to our earlier conversation about, I think AI itself will help us over time figure out the best way to do it. I think given we are giving context around everything, I think it'll give us more opportunities to also explain, okay, here's some commercial information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Like today as a podcaster, you do it at certain spots and you probably figure out what's best in your podcast. I think so there are aspects of that, but I think, you know, I think the underlying need of people value commercial information, businesses are trying to connect to users, all that doesn't change in an AI moment. But look, we will rethink it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
You've seen us in YouTube now do a mixture of subscription and ads, like obviously Facebook You know, we are now introducing subscription offerings across everything. And so as part of that, the optimization point will end up being a different place as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Our current plan is AI mode is going to be there as a separate tab for people who really want to experience that. But it's not yet at the level where our main search pages. But as features work, we'll keep migrating it to the main page. And so you can view it as a continuum. AI mode will offer you the bleeding edge experience. But it thinks that work will keep overflowing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
to AI overviews and the main experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Yes, that's going to be a core design principle for us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Dramatically different types of questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
It helps us deliver higher quality referrals, right? You know, where people are like, they have much higher likelihood of finding what they're looking for. They're exploring. They're curious. Their intent is getting satisfied more. So that's what all our metrics show. It makes the humans that create the web nervous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
It makes people nervous. Look, I think news and journalism will play an important role in the future. We're pretty committed to it, right? And so I think making sure that ecosystem, in fact, I think we'll be able to differentiate ourselves as a company over time because of our commitment there. So it's something I think I definitely value a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And as we are designing, we'll continue prioritizing approaches.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I feel like they're all super important things. I think it's good that you get a lot of crowdsourced information coming in. but I feel like there is real value for high quality journalism, right? And I think these are all complimentary. I think like I viewed as, I find myself constantly seeking out also, like try to find objective reporting on things too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And sometimes you get more context from the crowdfunded sources you read online, but I think both end up playing a super important role.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Today, like not everyone does, but you go to a big retail store, you love walking the aisle, you love shopping or grocery store, picking out food, et cetera, but you're also online shopping and they're delivering, right? So both are complimentary and like that's true for restaurants, et cetera. So I do feel like over time, websites will also get better for humans. they will be better designed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
AI might actually design them better for humans. So I expect the web to get a lot richer and more interesting and better to use. At the same time, I think there'll be an agentic web, which is also making a lot of progress. And you have to solve the business value and the incentives to make that work well, right? Like for people to participate in it. But I think both will coexist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And obviously, the agents may not need the same... I mean, not may not. They won't need the same design and UI paradigms which humans need to interact with. But I think both will be there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Look, it was a such a dynamic time in around 2004, 2005 with Ajax, the web suddenly becoming dynamic. In a matter of few months, Flickr, Gmail, Google Maps, all kind of came into existence, right? Like the fact that you have an interactive dynamic web, the web was evolving from simple text pages, simple HTML to rich dynamic applications.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
But at the same time, you could see the browser was never meant for that world, right? Like JavaScript execution was super slow. The browser was far away from being an operating system for that rich modern web, which is coming into place. So that's the opportunity we saw. It's an amazing early team. I still remember the day we got a shell on WebKit running and how fast it was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
We had a clear vision for building a browser Like we wanted to bring core OS principles into the browser, right? Like, so we built a secure browser sandbox, each tab was its own. These things are common now, but at the time, like it was pretty unique. We found an amazing team in Aarhus, Denmark with a leader
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
who built a V8, the JavaScript VM, which at the time was 25 times faster than any other JavaScript VM out there. And by the way, you're right, we open sourced it all and, you know, and put it in Chromium too. But, we really thought the web could work much better, much faster, and you could be much safer browsing the web.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And the name Chrome came was because we literally felt people were like, the Chrome of the browser was getting clunkier. We wanted to minimize it. And so that was the origins of the project. Definitely, obviously, highly biased person here talking about Chrome. But, you know, it's the most fun I've had building a product from the ground up. And, you know, it was an extraordinary team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Had my co-founders on the project were terrific. So definite fond memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I would have probably laughed it off. You know, probably too far-fetched to imagine or believe at that time. You would have to explain the internet first. For sure. I mean, computers to me at that time, you know, I was 12 in 1984. So probably, you know, by then I had started reading about them. I hadn't seen one. What was that place like? Take me to your childhood. I grew up in Chennai.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Yeah, look, Eric, who was the CEO at the time, I think it was less that he was opposed to it. He kind of firsthand knew what a crazy thing it is to go build a browser. And so he definitely was like, this is, you know, there was a crazy aspect to actually wanting to go build a browser. But he was very supportive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
You know, everyone, the founders were, I think once we started, you know, building something and we could use it and see how much better, from then on, like, you know, you're really tinkering with the product and making it better. It came to life pretty fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I mean, this is something Larry and Sergey have articulated clearly. I really internalized this early on, which is their whole feeling around working on moonshots, like as a way, when you work on something very ambitious, first of all, it attracts the best people, right? So that's an advantage you get. Number two. because it's so ambitious, you don't have others working on something crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
So you pretty much have the path to yourself, right? It's like Waymo and self-driving. Number three, it is, even if you end up quite not accomplishing what you set out to do and you end up doing 60, 80% of it, it'll end up being a terrific success. So, you know, that's the advice I would give people, right? I think like, you know, it's just aiming for big ideas, has all these advantages, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And it's risky, but it also has all these advantages, which people I don't think fully internalize.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I look really proud of the progress we have had with Waymo. One of the things I think we were very committed to, you know, the final 20% can look like, I mean, we always say, right, the first 80% is easy. The final 20% takes 80% of the time. I think we definitely were working through that phase with Waymo, but I was aware of that. So, but, you know, we knew we were at that stage. We knew we were
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
the technology gap between, while there were many people, many other self-driving companies, we knew the technology gap was there. In fact, right at the moment when others were doubting Waymo is when I don't know, made the decision to invest more in Waymo, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Because so in some ways it's counterintuitive, but I think, look, we've always been a deep technology company and like, you know, Waymo is a version of kind of building a AI robot that works well. And so we get attracted to problems like that the caliber of the teams there, you know, phenomenal teams. And so I know you follow the space super closely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
You know, I'm talking to someone who knows the space well, but it was very obvious it's going to get there. And, you know, there's still more work to do, but we, you know, it's a good example where we always prioritized being ambitious and safety at the same time, right? And equally committed to
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
both and pushed hard and couldn't be more thrilled with how it's working, how much people love the experience. And this year, definitely, we've scaled up a lot and we'll continue scaling up in 26. That said...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
We are... one of the earliest and biggest backers of SpaceX as Google, right? So thrilled with what SpaceX is doing and fortunate to be investors as a company there, right? And look, we don't compete with Tesla directly. We are not making cars, et cetera, right? We are building L45 autonomy. We are building a Waymo driver, which is general purpose and can be used in many settings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
It's in south of India. It's a beautiful, bustling city. Lots of people, lots of energy. You know, simple life. Definitely like fond memories of playing cricket outside the home. We just used to play on the streets. All the neighborhood kids would come out and we would play until it got dark and we couldn't play anymore. Barefoot. Traffic would come. We would just stop the game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
They're obviously working on making Tesla self-driving too. I've just assumed it's a de facto that Elon would succeed in whatever he does. So that is not something I question. But I think we are so far from these spaces are such vast spaces. Like I think about transportation, the opportunity space. The Waymo driver is a general purpose technology we can apply in many situations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
So you have a vast green space. In all future scenarios, I see Tesla doing well and Waymo doing well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
What do you think that would look like? Demis and the Google DeepMind team is very focused on Gemini robotics, right? So we are definitely building the underlying models well. So we have a lot of investments there. And I think we are also pretty cutting edge in our research there. So we are definitely driving that direction. We obviously are thinking about applications in robotics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
We'll kind of work seriously. We are partnering with a few companies today. But it's an area I would say, stay tuned. We are, you know, we are yet to fully articulate our plans outside, but it's an area we are definitely committed to driving a lot of progress. But I think AI ends up driving that massive progress in robotics. The field has been held back for a while.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I mean, the hardware has made extraordinary progress. The software had been the challenge, but, you know, with AI now and the and the generalized models we are building, we are building these models, getting them to work in the real world in a safe way, in a generalized way, is the frontier we're pushing pretty hard on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
That is what makes this moment so unique because running a company for the first time, you can do one investment in a very deep horizontal way. on top of which you can drive multiple businesses forward, right? And that's effectively what we are doing in Google and Alphabet, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Everything would drive through and you would just continue playing, right, just to kind of get the visual in your head. You know, pre-computers, there's a lot of free time. Now that I think about it, now you have to go and seek that quiet solitude or something. Newspapers, books is how I gained access to the world's information at the time, you will. My grandfather was a big influence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I think there'll be important moments, like it should be, like today... If you write a card in your own handwriting and send it to someone, that's a special thing. Similarly, there'll be a time, I mean, to your friends, maybe a friend wrote and said he's not doing well or something. You know, those are moments you want to save your times for writing something, reaching out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
But, you know, like saying, give me all the details of the trip you took. to me, makes a lot of sense for an AI assistant to help you, right? And so I think both are important, but I think I'm excited about that direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I think that's the holy grail. If you get this right, I think it allows more people to find that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I think a few things. Looking at Google, you know, we've given various stats around like 30% of code now uses AI-generated suggestions or whatever it is. But the most important metric, and we carefully measure it, is how much has our engineering velocity increased as a company due to AI? And it's tough to measure, and we kind of rigorously try to measure it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And our estimates are that number is now at 10%, right? Like now across the company, we've accomplished a 10% engineering velocity increase using AI. But we plan to hire engineers, more engineers next year, right? So because the opportunity space of what we can do is expanding too, right? And so-
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
He worked in the post office. He was so good with language. His English, you know, his handwriting till today is the most beautiful handwriting I've ever seen. He would write so clearly. He was so articulate. And so he kind of got me introduced into books. He loved politics. So we could talk about anything. And, you know, that was there in my family throughout.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I think hopefully, at least in the near to mid-term, for many engineers, it frees up more and more of the, even in engineering and coding, there are aspects which are so much fun. You're designing, you're architecting, you're solving a problem. There's a lot of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
grant work, you know, which all goes hand in hand, but it hopefully takes a lot of that away, makes it even more fun to code, frees you up more time to create, problem solve, brainstorm with your fellow colleagues and so on, right? So that's the opportunity there. And second, I think like, you know, it'll attract, it'll put...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
the creative power in more people's hands, which means people will create more. That means there'll be more engineers doing more things. So it's tough to fully predict, but I think in general, in this moment, it feels like people adopt these tools and be better programmers. There are more people playing chess now than ever before, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
So, you know, it feels positive that way to me, at least speaking from within a Google context. That's how I would, you know, talk to them about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
The big unlock will be as we make the agent capabilities much more robust. I think that's what unlocks that next big wave. I think the 10% is like a massive number. Like, you know, tomorrow, like I showed up and said, like, you can improve like a large organization's productivity by 10%. when you have tens of thousands of engineers, that's a phenomenal number.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And, you know, that's different than what others cite as statistics saying like, you know, like this percentage of code is now written by AI. I'm talking more about like overall actual productivity, right? Engineering productivity, which is two different things. And which is the more important metric. And But I think it'll get better, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And like, you know, I think there's no engineer who tomorrow, if you magically became 2x more productive, You're just going to create more things. You're going to create more value-added things. And so I think you'll find more satisfaction in your job, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I mean, that's a huge unlock. Think about like, you know, migrations, refactoring old code bases. Refactoring, yeah. Yeah, I mean, think about like, you know, once we can do all this in a much better, more robust way than where we are today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
So lots of books, trashy books, good books, everything from Ayn Rand to books on philosophy to stupid crime novels. So books was a big part of my life. But that kind of, this whole, it's not surprising I ended up at Google because Google's mission kind of always resonated deeply with me. This access to knowledge, I was hungry for it. but definitely have fond memories of my childhood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Such a good question. Look, I do think, you know, we're making sure, you know, we'll introduce at least one round of in-person interviews for people just to make sure the fundamentals are there. I think they'll end up being important. But it's an equally important skill. Look, if you can use these tools to generate better code, like, you know, I think that's an asset.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And so, you know, I think, so overall, I think it's a massive positive. Vibe coding engineer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
What do you think? I do. If you have a passion for computer science, I would. You know, computer science is obviously a lot more than programming alone. So I would. I still don't think I would change what you pursue. I think AI will horizontally allow impact every field. It's pretty tough to predict in what ways. So any education in which you're learning good first principles thinking,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
You know, the best innovations in computing have come when you're through a paradigm IO change, right? Like, you know, with GUI and then with a graphical user interface and then with multi-touch in the context of mobile voice later on. Similarly, I feel like, you know, AR is that next paradigm. I think it was held back both the system integration challenges of making good AR is very, very hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
The second thing is you need AI to actually kind of, otherwise the IO is too complicated. For you to have a natural seamless IO to that paradigm, AI ends up being super important. And so this is why Project Astra ends up being super critical for that Android XR world. But it is, I think when you use glasses and always been amazed at how useful these things are going to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
So look, I think it's a real opportunity for Android. I think XR is one way it'll kind of really come to life. But I think there's an opportunity to rethink the mobile OS too, right? I think we've been kind of living in this paradigm of like apps and shortcuts, all that won't go away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
But again, if you're trying to get stuff done at an operating system level, it needs to be more agentic so that you can kind of describe what you want to do or it proactively understands what you're trying to do, learns from how you're doing things over and over again. And kind of as adapting to you, all that is kind of like the unlock we need to go and do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
It's a good moonshot. Yeah, it's crazy. But, you know, I think we are, you know, but it's
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Access to knowledge was there, so that's the wealth we had. You know, every aspect of technology, I had to wait for a while. I've obviously spoken before about how long it took for us to get a phone, about five years, but it's not the only thing. A telephone. There was a five-year waiting list, and we got a rotary telephone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
It's a great question. Maybe it's proactive by then and should tell me a few things I should know. But I think if I were to ask it, I think it'll help us understand ourselves much better in a way that'll surprise us, I think. And so maybe that's, you already see people do it with the products. And so, but you know, in an AGI context, I think that'll be pretty powerful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
At a personal level or general human nature? At a personal level, like you talking to AGI, I think, you know, there is some chance it'll kind of understand you in a very deep way. I think, you know, in a profound way, that's a possibility.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I think there is also the obvious thing of like, maybe it helps us understand the universe better, you know, in a way that expands the frontiers of our understanding of the world. That is something super exciting. But look, I really don't know. I think, you know, I haven't had access to something that powerful yet. but I think those are all possibilities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
But it dramatically changed our lives. You know, people would come to our house to make calls to their loved ones. You know, I would have to go all the way to the hospital to get blood test records. And it would take two hours to go. And they would say, sorry, it's not ready. Come back the next day. Two hours to come back. And that became a five-minute thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Many years ago, I think it was a MIT study, they just estimated the impact of Google Search, and they basically said it's the equivalent to, on a per-person basis, it's a few thousands of dollars per year per person, right? Like it's the value that got created per year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
right and and but it's yeah it's tough to capture these things right you kind of take it take it for granted as these things come uh and and the frontier keeps moving but uh you know, how do you measure the value of something like alpha fold over time, right? And so on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
So as a kid, like, I mean, this light bulb went in my head. You know, this power of technology to kind of change people's lives. We had no running water. You know, it was a massive drought. So they would get water in these trucks, maybe eight buckets per household. So me and my brother, sometimes my mom, we would wait in line, get that and bring it back home.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Look, I think... It's tough to articulate. In the essence of humanity, there's something about, you know, the consciousness we have, what makes us uniquely human. Maybe the lines will blur over time and it's tough to articulate. But I hope, hopefully, you know, we live in a world where if you make resources more plentiful and make the world lesser of a zero-sum game over time, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Which it's not, but in a resource-constrained environment, people perceive it to be, right? And so I hope the values of what makes us uniquely human, empathy, kindness, all that surfaces more as the aspirational hope I have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Both the right new questions to ask and the answers to them and the self-discovery process, which it'll drive, I think, You know, our early work with both co-scientists and Alpha Evolve, just super exciting to see. What gives you hope about the future of human civilization? Look, I've always... I'm an optimist, and, you know, I look at...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Now, if you were to say you take the journey of human civilization, it's been, you know, we've relentlessly made the world better, right, in many ways. At any given moment in time, there are big issues to work through. It may look, but, you know, I always ask myself the question, would you have been born now or any other time in the past? I most often, not most often, almost always say,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
would rather be born now right you know and so that's the extraordinary thing the human civilization has accomplished right and like you know and we've kind of constantly made the world a better place and so something tells me as humanity we always rise collectively to drive that frontier forward so i expect it to be no different in the future I agree with you totally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Many years later, like we had running water and we had a water heater and you would get hot water to take a shower. I mean, like, so, you know, for me, everything was discreet like that. And so I've always had this thing, you know, first hand feeling of like how technology can dramatically change like your life and like the opportunity it brings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
So, you know, that was kind of a subliminal takeaway for me throughout growing up. And, you know, I kind of actually observed it and felt it, you know, so. we had to convince my dad for a long time to get a VCR. Do you know what a VCR is? Yeah. I'm trying to date you now. But, you know, because before that, you only had like kind of one TV channel, right? That's it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
And so, you know, you can watch movies or something like that. But this was by the time I was in 12th grade, we got a VCR, you know, it was a, like a Panasonic, which we had to go to some, like, shop, which had kind of smuggled it in, I guess, and that's where we bought a VCR. But then being able to record, like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
a World Cup football game, and then, or like get bootleg videotapes and watch movies, like all that. So like, you know, I had these discrete memories growing up. And so, you know, always left me with the feeling of like how getting access to technology drives that step change in your life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
To have that convenience of going and opening a tap and have hot water come out, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Oh, I mean, it's extraordinary. You know, I go back to India now, the power of mobile. You know, it's mind-blowing to see the progress through the arc of time. It's phenomenal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
Look, you have a lot of luck along the way, but you obviously have to make smart choices. You're thinking about what you want to do. Your brain is telling you something. But when you do things, I think it's important to kind of get that, listen to your heart and see whether you actually enjoy doing it, right? That feeling of if you love what you do,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
It's so much easier and you're going to see the best version of yourself. It's easier said than done. I think it's tough to find things you love doing. But I think kind of listening to your heart a bit more than your mind in terms of figuring out what you want to do, I think is one of the best things I would tell people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
The second thing is, I mean, trying to work with people who you feel at various points in my life, I've worked with people who I felt were better than me. Kind of like, you know, you almost are sitting in a room talking to someone and they're like, wow. You know, and you want that feeling a few times. Trying to get yourself in a position
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
where you're working with people who you feel are kind of like stretching your abilities is what helps you grow, I think. So putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, And I think often you'll surprise yourself. So I think being open-minded enough to kind of put yourself in those positions is maybe another thing I would say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet
I do get angry. I do get frustrated. I have the same emotions all of us do, right, in the context of work and everything. But a few things, right, I think, you know, I... Over time, I figured out the best way to get the most out of people. You know, you kind of find mission-oriented people who are on the shad journey, who have this inner drive to excellence, to do the best.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 05-21-2025 6PM EDT
Google's new feature is called AI Mode, and Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai says it's a total reimagining of search. AI Mode appears to operate like other AI chatbots, answering questions, making suggestions, and entertaining follow-up queries. Google has dominated internet search for about a quarter century.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 05-21-2025 6PM EDT
But analysts and industry insiders believe that increasingly powerful AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity pose a threat as more and more people turn to AI for answers.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 05-21-2025 6PM EDT
Concerns about AI's incursion into the search arena grew earlier this month when an Apple executive testified in a court case involving Google that traditional Google searches in Apple's Safari browser had fallen for the first time in two decades. John Rewich, NPR News.
Search Engine
How do we survive the media apocalypse? (Part 2)
Welcome to Google I.O. It's great to have all of you with us.