HIGHLIGHTS: Ruth Porat - President and CIO of Alphabet

0:00Hi, everybody. Tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi, everybody. I'm Nikolaj Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. And today I'm in really good company because I'm here with Ruth Porat, the President and Chief Investment Officer of Alphabet, which is the parent company of Google. Now, of course, Google needs no introduction, but Alphabet, in addition, also makes self-driving cars, AI chips, it owns YouTube and many more things. And we own 1.3 % of the company, totaling roughly$30 billion. So big welcome, Ruth.

0:36It's great to be with you. Thank you. Who is going to win the AI race? Well, we feel we're in a really strong position for a number of reasons. I think when you look at the history of Google focused on AI, we started many, many years ago. And at this point, we have a very differentiated approach, which starts with the extraordinary team we have led by Demis Asabas, who obviously just won the Nobel Prize. That goes to the strength of the models. You look at what we're doing on chips with our TPUs. And then we're already really using it across our various platforms. So billions of people are benefiting from AI.

1:20So this full stack approach, we think, is an important element. That being said, what's exciting to see is how much innovation there is broadly and so what we're looking at is the opportunity i think collectively globally to have an unlock from the upside given the innovation that we're seeing not just at google but at other places some of your competitors say that you were a bit slow out of the box when it came to ai models but um your latest gemini it's uh it's it's phenomenal so so what happened here Well, Google search for decades has really stood for extraordinary quality. It's what everybody around the globe expects of us.

2:06When you go to Google, quality answer very rapidly surfaced for you in the most potent way. And one of the very important questions for us, Sundar's talked about this, in the early days of generative AI, internally, we were all talking about the risk of hallucination. And that term now is very well known quite broadly. And one of the concerns is if you in the middle of the night wake up, your child is sick, you want to figure out how much Tylenol to give to a three-year-old, there can be no margin for error. That's what our brand stands for. And so it was very important to us to make sure that as we were evolving and applying generative AI, we did it in a way that was consistent with the quality that's expected appropriately from Google.

2:57And I appreciate your question because what you've seen is the really ongoing momentum in models and introducing models more broadly externally, what we've done with, for example, AI overviews, where when you search, you'll get this kind of an AI cockpit is the way I like to think about it. You're seeing more in things like model advancement that can be applied in other applications. And so we're excited about the momentum that people have seen through 2024 and what is ahead in 2025. You, before the holiday season, sent shocks waves through the world with your Willow quantum chip. So why is that such a leap forward?

3:39So we've been working on quantum AI, I've been doing quantum computing for quite some time, well over, I think, a decade at this point. And what's really exciting is the computational capabilities with quantum. So the Willow chip is able to handle a computation in less than five minutes that previously, on the best supercomputers on the planet today, would take 10 septillion years, which even I had to Google, it's 24 zeros on the back of it. So what that means in terms of the ability to see and analyze more, whether it's in biology or other areas, is exciting and profound. And so we see this as another path that we will continue to execute against.

4:26Another thing is where you are strong. It's a self-driving taxi company. Now, I'm not sure what the latest number is in terms of rides per week. Where are you now? 200 ,000 rides, paid rides. Wow. So what will the city look like in five years time or 10 years time? When do you think it will be properly rolled out? Well, I think if I just step back and talk a bit about Waymo, because we are very excited about it. You know, we started on that journey more than a decade ago as well. And the original thesis is that more than a million people die on the road every year in accidents. And if AI can help improve the safety of driving because our Waymo self-driver, the AI does not get tired.

5:11It does not get distracted. It stays focused on the road. You've got camera sensors everywhere. We can improve safety. We can help save lives. And that was a really exciting motivator for the team. We've been rolling it out. It's been extraordinary to see the take-up. It's now one of the top attractions in San Francisco. if anyone's out this way, but we're also in LA and Phoenix and Austin and expanding. And we're going to continue to expand because you see both the reaction to it when people get in. Some people are anxious about it at first, and then within literally under a minute, they just go right into whatever it is they wanted to be doing.

5:49There's a safety element around it. So we think it'll continue to be rolled out. We're doing a pilot in Japan right now, And there's an opportunity, we think, to help save lives and are excited about doing that. So tell me about a time recently when you learned something about a project and you just thought, wow, this is just like way cool. Or does it happen all the time? I am completely in awe of what we're able to do with health care. Because you had breast cancer, right? Exactly. I've had breast cancer twice, actually. And Google, the amazing engineers identified the opportunity to diagnose early stage metastatic breast cancer.

6:40And what's extraordinary is in the testing of it, they found that relative to the 80 ,000 sample set, they found 20 % more cases, more incidences of cancer and no false positives. And as we all know, the difference between survival or not, or a really difficult course of treatment at stage four versus two is really meaningful. And so the ability, I still have a wow moment with that, that we with AI and with breakthroughs like that can give people the opportunity for the early diagnosis that's needed. And what's really important in discussing this with my oncologist, he said, what it does is it enables any doctor anywhere across the U.S.

7:34around the globe to be operating at the highest level because they have this assist, this augmented intelligence. To me, that becomes an extraordinary wow moment when you think about what we can do. And we're doing it not just in breast cancer. There's early diagnosis in lung cancer, in something called diabetic retinopathy, which is blindness from diabetes. And in that instance, early detection leads to early intervention that's manageable around the globe. So many places, early detection isn't a panacea. It's not an answer. It's an assist, but then you need the rest of the treatment as well.

8:13So there are a lot of wow moments that come. Well, thanks for sharing that. So we both went to Wharton. And if you were giving the commencement speech, which I'm actually doing in May, what would you be telling the graduate students? You know, I actually did do that a number of years ago.

8:38And as I... But what would you tell them now? I mean, have you changed your mind? Probably not, because I think the core principles for me never stop learning. My father was a Holocaust refugee. He had no high school or college education. He ended up enlisting in the British Army. He fought in the two battles of Al-Aliman, and he taught himself engineering and physics because he knew or he assumed that if he survived, he wanted to get to a place that was safe and he needed a skill that people would value. And he thought engineering and physics would be that skill. And as a child, he always told me that his fellow soldiers would tease him and say, you're going to be dead before you can ever use this.

9:23And he would say, I'd rather die an educated man. And then the lesson for me as a child, my siblings, was education is a passport for life. And I firmly believe that. And I think that one of the most important things is never stop learning. So that's why I said when I found myself plateau in my career, I would go to somebody I respected and say, what is my highest and best use? And I was open to change and continuing to grow. I think that's one really important one.

9:56you