How Sundar Pichai is rethinking Google for the AI era

0:00Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College Deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox Wireless Controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at The Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the Nexgrill 4 Burner Gas Grill on special buy for only$199.

0:42And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove 7-piece outdoor dining set for only$499. This Memorial Day, get low prices guaranteed at The Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th through May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See homedepot.com slash price match for details. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in a conversation we recorded just after the Google I.O. Developer Conference. This is the fifth year Sundar and I have sat down after I.O., and it's become one of my favorite Decoder traditions.

1:20There's always a lot of news at I.O., and this year was no exception. Google has powerful new Gemini models, it's putting AI agents in everything, and it's making huge changes to search on both the web and YouTube that will once again reshape the information ecosystem. That's a lot to talk about, and Sundar and I got into all of it. But I also realized that it's been a long time since I'd asked Sundar the decoder questions about structure and decision-making. So I started there. You'll hear Sundar say he realized he needed to rethink how Google worked a few years ago in response to the chat GPT, and he made a lot of executive changes and big decisions to get the company in a more aggressive posture.

1:55Of course, we also talked about all of those search changes and how it seems obvious that the future of Google Search is bringing things like the new Intelligent Search box together with Google's new Gemini Spark agent platform so that searches can set off tasks, not just deliver results. That's exciting, but it seems likely to yet again change the dynamics of the open web. If you're a decoder listener, you know that I coined the term Google Zero a few years ago. That's the idea that Google traffic to websites would fall to zero as the company answered more and more queries directly on the search results page.

2:26That's gone from an idea that Sundar batted away in previous interviews to something that the entire media industry is grappling with. The CEOs of major publishers like Condé Nast are now publicly saying they're planning for a world of zero search traffic from now on. Google is also training its models on YouTube videos and changing YouTube search to summarize and index videos so they get dropped directly into the relevant parts. That's sure to cause some creator angst. So I asked Sundar if he's ready to fight the same battles with YouTubers as he currently is with publishers. Finally, I had to ask Sundar about Google DeepMind CEO Demis Asabas ending the I.O.

3:00keynote by saying that we are at the foothills of the singularity. It's no surprise that Sundar agrees with Demis, but his thoughts on the timeline to AGI are worth paying attention to. Like I said, this is one of my favorite episodes to do every year, because Sundar is always game to actually take the questions and even look at search results on my phone with me. I think you're really going to like this year's conversation. Okay, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google. Here we go.

3:36Sunav Achai, the CEO of Alphabet and of Google. Welcome back to Decoder. It's great to be here. Nice to see you again, Eli. Yeah, this is one of my favorite yearly conversations. I think we've done it at IAO now almost five times. Wow. I quite didn't realize it's been five times, but I enjoy it. Thanks again. Yeah. I want to start with a little bit of a lightning round. I was thinking about this. We've talked a lot. We always get deep into the weeds of the web and search and big, heady ideas. And I realized I have not asked you the decoder questions in quite some time. And I was just looking back at our previous conversations and Google itself.

4:07You've made quite a lot of changes to Google. I think a number of your direct reports have changed over time. You've obviously restructured DeepMind platforms and devices and Android has been restructured itself. Tell me how Google is structured right now. Okay, it is Google and Alphabet. Obviously, we have Alphabet as well. But broadly, I think about it as there are three main businesses in Google, Search, YouTube, Google Cloud. There are enormous platforms we run, which is Android, Chrome, and the whole area to do with it. and powering it all is all these important technology areas, which is AI and our infrastructure work.

4:58And then you have the functions to go with it. But at a high level, you can think of it as, you know, search, YouTube, Google Cloud, and then our big computing platforms. Those are the main groups. And obviously powered with Google DeepMind and our infrastructure teams. So that's one simple way to get a mental model around it. And of course, we have other bets beyond that, Waymo being the most prominent of them all. But there are many, many other bets like isomorphic labs and so on. Yeah. I want to stay focused on the Google of it. I feel like we could do an entire hour on Alphabet and how that's structured and how that works.

5:37It's a public company with many bets. But just to stay focused on Google for one second. The knock on Google historically is this is a company that ships lots and lots of products. You cancel lots of products. There's not tons of focus. There's like thousands of names of different products that are overlapping in kinds of different ways. And where that comes from, at least in my view, is that you do have these big infrastructure bets. You have all these capabilities. And the people running the businesses can use those capabilities to spin up products. And there's maybe not a lot of overlap or central planning on like, did we launch two of the same thing?

6:10How do you resolve that tension? It does seem like Google has gotten a little more focused, but that is the company's culture, right? We're going to make a lot of bets and see which ones work. How does that resolve for you? Look, I think there's a lot of intent in what we do too. I think it's not an accident. You know, we have 13 products with a billion users each, and we've been as committed to those products longer term. You know, you can go back and think about when Gmail launched or Maps launched or Google Docs launched or Search launched or Chrome launched. So we've been deep and consistent in many, many areas over a long period of time as well.

6:48I do think one way I've internalized in the AI movement is for the first time, we have such a common infrastructure powering all of them with our Gemini models and the underlying AI infrastructure. So we are more able to intently, with intent do things which cut across things. So personal intelligence is a great example of it. It's one effort. Obviously, users get a choice to turn it on in each of the products. But it's built with one common infrastructure so that it works consistently across your products. The underlying Gemini models itself is an example of it. So we are able to bring that model in the context of the products, It's like Ask Maps in the context of the Maps product.

7:39But a lot of the technology powering it, the voice stack, the model, the intelligence, it's all one work. Which is why I think the AI moment offers us a new, really new way to think about it. And not just across Google, across Alphabet too, over time. I think that's what makes this moment so uniquely powerful, is that you can invest so much in R &D and infrastructure and develop a technology, which then you can apply across all these areas. Obviously, in a context in which they are useful for users, but the underlying technology platform is common. So there's a lot of intent that way and so on.

8:18You have to give room for innovation. Otherwise, so allowing room for innovation where teams on the margin are able to ship some new features. Sometimes you later work to harmonize them. Take Notebook, Notebook LM. notebooks are now showing up in Gemini, right? And it's effectively projects as notebooks. And you can create a notebook in Gemini. You can go to notebook.lm. You will see the same notebooks, vice versa. So that's an example of where you innovate it first, and then you're harmonizing later. Yeah. I was watching the keynote yesterday, and I saw a lot of intent and confidence from Google.

8:58We have this core technology. We can express it in lots of ways. It's still essentially Google-y. Like there's lots of products, lots of Gemini words. I'm going to figure them all out. I promise. I would contrast to three, four years ago when, you know, there was the chat GPT moment. Everyone worried about what Google would do, could open a show up and take your market share and search away. Between that and now you have changed Google, right? You have restructured it. There are new people in leadership roles. How connect those dots for me. How did you think about, OK, I need to actually change how the company works with the competitive moment you were in that got you here?

9:36That's a great question. Look, I think for me, I always internalize that moment. It was tough to convey it outside. But I was, you know, we had set the company. You know, I pivoted the company to be AI first. We had all the ingredients. So in some ways, I felt like the overton window had changed. people who are adopting these technologies faster than we had expected. And so to me, it was a way to go and actually express ourselves through our products. But I realized we had to organize ourselves for it. And going back to my earlier point, I realized we need a core models and a core infrastructure team to power everything we are doing across Google.

10:19So a lot of my initial energy was to go set that up. one AI team. We had world-class research teams in brain and deep mind, bringing that together as Google DeepMind, which was harder than it sounds because it's like saying, go put Stanford and MIT together and create a department out of it or a university out of it. So I think doing that well. And then at that time, I also set up with Amin Vadath, who's our SVP of AI infrastructure now, a centralized infrastructure team, which has paid great dividends. And then another evolution was realizing we need a chief AI architect to kind of architect this technology across Google and Cori taking on that role as well.

11:10So those were important changes. We obviously made sure search needed to move faster. So search was split across many leaders, So pulling it under Elizabeth Reed with Nick Fox being responsible for the overall area. Josh Woodward coming to help with our labs product and working on Gemini later, driving innovation. As well as, you know, obviously I have extraordinary leaders in the company, other leaders like Philip Schindler, who runs all our operations and so on. So it is stepping back and end-to-end thinking about the structure and make sure we are set up well for this moment where we need to move faster as a company, which meant we needed to make faster decisions.

11:56I set up these new product reviews once a week. These were AI product reviews, making sure we are intentful about how we apply this technology, where we apply them, and wanted to review everything firsthand that anything to do with AI, which we were shipping to users, went through that channel. And I spent time directly with whoever was working on it. Yeah. The other decoder question I ask everybody is about decisions. You're describing a lot of big decisions, some of them uncomfortable as you change people around. How do you make decisions? What's your framework? A big part of my framework is over time understanding that there are very, very few decisions which are really consequential.

12:40And most decisions aren't. So what matters much more is that you make the decision because that's what determines the velocity of an organization. And so the more you're able to make those decisions and keep the company moving forward, you're generally better off. Of course, there are a few decisions like combining and setting up Google DeepMind. Those are more consequential and you want to take your time deliberating and doing it. But a lot of decision making is about just making them. and so the more you're able to do that you do develop over time some pattern matching and some intuition for you've seen a version of the problem before and so I think it's good to rely on that and separate the signal from the noise so that the signal is that this is a really important decision and you want to really deliberate around it versus this is just it may look big but it is more a normal course of action you need to take.

13:41Yeah. Looking around the industry, your peers in big tech have some of the wildest org chart ideas I've ever heard in my entire life. I think Meta wants to have 50 engineers report to a single manager with the power of agents. Jack Dorsey at Block wants all 6 ,000 people to report to him. Are you having similar thoughts that you should invent some of the craziest org charts with AI ever? Look, I think leaders and people are incredibly important. And And I think our companies, it depends on what the company, some companies have a much more narrower suite of products. And so different structure may work.

14:15When you're running something at the scale of, take the scale of Google Cloud, I think it's important that there is a CEO in charge and we are serving all the top enterprises in the world at a scale. So how do you set up for that? So I think great leaders end up mattering a lot, like we have Thomas there. So I do think about it. What I do think about it is how are we using AI more effectively? And we have seen the transition internally, particularly amongst our developers, where we have transitioned from using AI tools to assist coding to them, a portion of the engineers, working, directing teams of agents effectively more and more.

15:00And so I think those are transitions underway. And I think that will flow beyond just engineering into the rest of the organization. It's already happening. Like even the work we are doing in Gemini Spark is to give that superpower to the hands of consumers, what you can do with these agentic workflows, etc. So I'm more focused on making sure we are actually deploying that capability in a native way and that it's working well. because for us, it's more than just making the company efficient because it's the products we provide to others. So I look at it with a very different lens. How we do it internally is what we are giving to users outside.

15:40We use antigravity internally. That's what we are providing outside. So the agents and antigravity is what our developers are using. And so that's what we are trying to put outside. So it has that extra dimension to it. The number one question Decoder listeners want me to start asking CEOs, I'll just ask it straightforwardly. How close is Ed to replacing you as the CEO? No, it is today still. I just think the CEO job is not that complicated, right? It is not complicated. There are aspects of it where I think it's going to be very, very helpful in terms of decision making. I joke around that, partially joke around, which is like I have to spend a lot of time allocating compute.

16:25And I'm like, well, that seems like the AI is going to make more rational choices over time because I deal with a lot of appeals and emotions as part of working through a process like that. So I think, look, everywhere what I see, and which is maybe a bit different to how I think, I think done correctly, these tools are going to kind of allow us to operate at the next level in everything we are doing. like you know it's not like you won't do what you were doing before you will start from a higher foundation uh i wasn't there when like i don't know spreadsheets rolled out to companies right and like i almost i have to go think back how did people do all this financial analysis before right and and i'm sure it changed over a period of three to four years fundamentally and we got used to it i think agents etc is a version of it uh it's not like you're not going to plan birthday parties.

17:21It is just that, you know, what you, let's say you're planning a trip somewhere, maybe you're actually spending your time thinking about the actual things you want to do with your time versus chasing opening times and how to get tickets and so on. So I think it elevates everything to a different foundation is how I think about it. We have to pause here for a quick break. We'll be right back.

17:52This week on Net Worth and Chill, we're joined by Danielle Robay, the journalist Forbes called the queen of questions and the host behind Reese Witherspoon's book club podcast and her own show, Question Everything. We're exploring a skill that can transform your career, relationships and bank account, knowing how to ask the right questions. Danielle breaks down the art of getting real answers in professional settings from coffee chats to career pivots and shares the money conversations we should all be having but aren't. Get ready for hard-hitting advice on defining success beyond the dollar signs, asking better money questions with partners and friends, and the mindset shifts that separate people who stay stuck from people who keep growing.

18:32Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff.

18:43Welcome back. I'm talking with Google CEO Sundar Pichai about some of the announcements the company just made at Google I.O.

18:51Let me ask you about that. And agents, some of those demos are fascinating. The idea that the search is going to build custom software for everybody. That seems like an idea in software engineering, a first impression, right? The idea that the computer, you're going to ask it a question and the response will be for it to make you software that helps you get to an answer. I'm fascinated by this idea. But that is fundamentally changing search. And then you kind of look at Gemini Spark, which is your agent platform in the cloud, where you will say, go book me some tickets, and Spark might run around and book you some tickets or do some tasks for you.

19:24And then there's Antigravity, the agentic coding platform. Broadly, every year there's like a new paradigm for AI, right? There was LLMs first, and then maybe we're going to chain some LLMs together. Then there's reasoning, and then now we're agents. Is this the foundation or is there another paradigm shift to come? I think it's a great question. We are laying most of the building blocks in place, I think. I think fundamentally being able to reason, use tools and code are a lot of like having intelligence and reasoning, being able to plan, being able to look up things, use tools. and if you need as part of that to build something so you are kind of laying all the primitives and and obviously anti-gravity is for developers but the anti-gravity engine the harness is built into uh a gemini now right and and you know spark is just a mode of gemini over time it's a feature we're positioning it but you know it's just a tab within gemini and so you're bringing that agentic harness.

20:38Users don't need to think about it. Developers will understand it. Over time, in Spark, they can code powerful things. But as users, you may be building something, creating something, planning a trip, and all that is working behind the scenes. So I do think we are laying a lot of the primitives of what we need agents to work end-to-end, or more importantly, AI to work. You know, this long-running vision of Assistant we've all had and worked through myriad forms of it and, you know, and failing to fully do it well, I think we are closer than ever before to deliver on that promise. We haven't delivered it yet, you know, but that's the journey, which I think is closer than ever before.

21:26I look at all the products, and they do seem like they should converge, right? You have the new intelligence search box, and I definitely want to talk about search in more detail. But you look at that search box, and then you look at it's Canvas that makes you the apps. You're planning a wedding, and it'll just make you an app to help you plan a trip or a wedding or something. And then you have Spark, where it can go off and do things. And I looked at that, and I was talking to people yesterday, and it just seems obvious that that should be one product. It will. The agents, just like I gave the earlier notebook example of like, you're creating notebooks.

21:59What are notebooks? You're effectively putting all the context you want in one place and then working off it. It's folders as they've always existed for people. And notebooks should be a consistent primitive across the Google products you use. I just view agents that way. It shouldn't matter. And so I do think when you're at the earliest stage of innovation, you create the capability. I think teams are experimenting with it. but for a user over time if you fire off planning a trip it should work uh across both places is how i would think about it you're right in that there's something very important about google search and it is a source of truth for people for however many years decades now the go google it and you'll get an answer and that answer is the same for you and me generally has been a very important idea like it's i think a fixture in the culture maybe google is the last company saying it will just tell you the truth out of all the companies out there.

22:58OK, we're going to infinitely personalize the search box. We're going to infinitely personalize the search experience. And we're all going to get different answers to queries. We're all going to maybe even look at different interfaces, depending on what we're asking, what our personal context is, how much data Google has. Do you think about that profoundly? Like, how much can you destabilize the last sort of common source of truth most people experience on the internet? Look, I think there are factors well beyond our control, which is people today have a wider variety of sources than ever before.

23:31So I think people are getting content from so many different sources. But within the world of Google, I still think we deeply care about this being a source of knowledge and information. I think there are objective experiences and subjective experiences, right? What's the capital of the USA? say, you know, it's not going to be custom created for anyone, right? These are objective things. Help me plan a nice trip to Montreal for a weekend. You know, naturally, the answers don't need to be the same for everyone, right? So there is a continuum there. I do think the more, you know, so we deeply care about, you know, for certain categories of information, we do still anchor around authoritative information to present as much of an objective view as possible.

24:23And if it is health-related queries, we naturally tend to show more authoritative answers than if you're saying, what sweater should I go by? Yeah. Can I show you a search result? A few years ago, I showed you a search result. I've been tracking this one for years. I always love amongst the 10 trillion queries. Yes. Well, this one's a favorite. We have a very scientific, statistical way of doing this. I think this is important. And I want to get into how consumers might be experiencing these products. So this is a search I just do all the time for best Chromebook. I'll just show it to you. There it is.

25:00So it starts with an AI overview. It just very confidently tells you the answer. And then there's a bunch of sponsored boxes. And then the one that gets me is right below that. I believe the result is Reddit. And it has a top result in Reddit. And it's actually a different answer than the AI overview. And then there's like the times, which has a different answer. And you kind of scroll this and you're like, the AI overview is telling me one thing. The first organic result is like fairly down the page. And all of these are different answers. And I hear what you're saying about objective results and subject results.

25:29What laptop should I buy is somewhere in the middle of those things, right? And I'm just curious how you think that experience for consumers is today in AI mode and where you think it should go. look i think um i mean to be very clear in the world of ai always in ai mode we are organizing giving context but there are sources throughout so you're still presenting organic content in a different way right so i mean there are links and sources you're giving to but there is an opinion to go with it too which is what you're uh you're talking about um i do think you know some of this will be iterative with users, right?

26:07I think one of the great things we find with search is it's easy to measure user satisfaction. For 25 years, we've learned to measure user happiness, user satisfaction in a correlated way with improving the quality of the product, not for short term. So that's why we do these long-term studies. And if we get wrong or get any experience wrong, it shows in the metrics and we course correct. Yeah. And we pride on the ability to track this over longer term, be it engagement, sessions, returning to a topic, the number of bounce backs they do. So very, very sophisticated way of looking at it. I think in some areas like that, I think the experience will continue to evolve.