Google’s Sundar Pichai Talks Seach, AI, and Dancing with Microsoft

23:51But this is not to say there's not always hard work to get it right, right? But what I'm saying is you're only as good as the web, right? Always. Like at the end of the day, Google search can only really show you what's on the web. It's as good as the richness of the web. Right. Yes. But if you're a new creator and you just want to communicate with some audience, it is far more likely that you will end up on a TikTok or you will end up on a sub stack or you will end up on Instagram. Maybe YouTube, which you have access to. But those platforms, they're not so visible to the average Google search user.

24:25So the new stuff, the high quality stuff, the more interesting stuff maybe, is ending up on platforms that Google search can't see. And the web is being pushed towards the incentives of Google search. When was the last time you tried to get a new credit card? It's been a while, yeah. Yeah, just that experience, right, is like a totally optimized experience. It's almost not human readable anymore in a particular way. And I'm just wondering, you see search generative experience. is this your opportunity to change those incentives? Do you see that as creating better incentives to create for the web again?

24:59Yeah, it's going to be a fact of life. I think mobile has come, video is here to stay. So there's going to be many different types of content. And the web is not at the center of everything like it once was. I think that's been true for a while. Having said that, it's ironic that all the recent launches of these products So all like, you know, bar, chat, they're all web-based. Yeah, I can do 30 minutes on mobile app stores and why the innovation's on the web, but I don't think I have enough time. And, you know, I worked on Chrome. I've cared about the web for a long time. The web belongs to no one.

25:36So there is inherent value in that. And there are aspects of the web which are stronger than what most people realize. But I want to underestimate with AI, as AI becomes multimodal, this distinction we feel between text and images and video, blurs over time. So today we feel those walls. At Google, we've always tried to bridge these things. We did universal search. We try to bring all these forms together. With AI, I think, so are maybe a young content creator creates it in the form of a video. But down the line, maybe there is ways by which you can consume it in the context of Google. Obviously, all the details have to be figured out and there are business models.

26:21These platforms have to let you in, right? You can't search against Instagram. I can, but we can against YouTube, right? As an example. And maybe there are other platforms. We have to create the incentive for them to put it up there. And then that's on us to do. So I think, you know, I look at it as, is user need for information going up or down? It is. There's more sources of information than ever before. So I just somehow, I feel more optimistic over time because these same questions were very deep few years ago. Like I remember people asking me about it, but I come all the way today and, you know, and I think if anything, I'm using a lot more of the web still, right?

27:06And, you know, I go to the Verge website all the time. We're believers in the web. We're the last ones. Yeah, I understand. But, you know, my usage still tells me I go to websites directly every day, where each day they're trying me over and over and over again to download the mobile app. They're getting me to agree to some cookies and all that stuff. But the web has worked its way through all that. I hope it gets better, but, you know, I'm optimistic. Yeah. As you answer more and more of the questions in the search generative experience, I think you gave an example of essentially an automated buying guide, right?

27:42I think it was for a bicycle. And then you asked a follow-up question. I want it in red, and it showed you the right colors. Do you think that you're going to send out as much traffic from the search engine as you have in the past? It was a big part of our design goal when I talk about getting it right. I think people come to Google with many different intents. There are times you just want an answer. I'm going to go to New York tomorrow. I want to know whether it's raining. Yeah. Right? You want the answer. But there are many times, particularly to Google, people come to explore, to discover.

28:14And I think that's true. People want to read reviews. So our search generative experience, in fact, we really didn't want to just do where you come and talk to LLM. That's why we did bot separately at first. And in a search generative experience, you will see a lot of links. You can click expand. we go through and give for each of what the LLM has generated, what are the supporting sources? So one of our design goals is to making sure people come and experience the richness of the web. Because I think it's important for us to create that win-win construct. And so, you know, it's something we put a lot of thought into it.

28:53So I'm optimistic we'll get it right there. I want to ask some decoder questions. There's a big one here. I joke that it's a show about org charts. You are the CEO of both Alphabet and Google. You made a big decision about your org chart. You had a company called DeepMind that was part of Alphabet. You pulled it into Google. You combined it with Google Brain, which is the AI part of Google. You picked a new leadership. Walk me through that decision in the context of I wanted to make these products and I needed to change my org chart to get there. For a while, obviously, I felt fortunate we had arguably two of the top three maybe research teams in the world.

29:32I mentioned this at I.O. I think if you go back and look at the, I didn't even put up all the list of the things they had done. If you look at the 10 to 20 seminal breakthroughs, which led to this moment where we are, those two teams together account for a large number of them. But it was clear to us that as we started going through this journey to build more capable models, one of the things that was holding us back was the computational resources that we would need. And so we would need to pull them together. So in some ways, and I think the good thing is the teams themselves came to the realization.

30:07So Gemini predates the combining of the two teams. So they started working together jointly on Gemini. And that was a great experience because seeing, bringing, it's almost like being able to pull together two great teams and seeing that and how well it's working. And I think, you know, conversations with Demis and Jeff naturally led to that moment. So I think it was a good time to do it as we are also pivoting more from research to commercial production ready models at scale. and also needing to do it safely and responsibly, which means you have to dedicate a lot of resources to testing and safety.

30:46And so the combination of all that made it the right moment. And so that's what led to this moment. So that's the strategy side, right? You've got two teams. They have redundancies in their resource needs and their infrastructure needs. But then there's you actually deciding, okay, so I've got two leaders on two teams. I'm going to pick one. The teams have different cultures. I want this culture. I would like to get more of this output and less of this redundancy. How did you make those decisions? You're right. It's always about, I think, the most important thing is having clarity about what you're trying to accomplish.

31:21And once you do that, it's always about then everything else follows from that. In this case, Jeff clearly had expressed a desire for a while to be more of a chief scientist. Jeff, before he literally has built some of the most important systems we use at Google today. He is, at least to me, without a doubt, the best engineer Google has ever had. And his desire to spend more time doing that. And Demis is an extraordinary leader of teams. And he has been working on building capable AI systems from the first day I met him. This is what he has been wanting to do. And so he's super excited. So the combination of knowing the people you have, what makes sense, all falling from the first principle of what you're trying to accomplish, is what leads to the other decision.

32:10So in some ways it was a clearer set of next steps from there. Did you make a phone call? Did you have a meeting? Did you have Gmail write a note for you? No, no, no. We had a lot of good meetings. James Manika played an important role because in the context of Gemini, we were bringing these teams together anyway. And Jeff naturally was spending time doing a lot of the engineering work. And so it all made sense. And just a few conversations and led to the right outcome. I would say bringing the two teams together is indicative of a larger change in Google and the tech industry at large, which is getting smaller, more efficient, less redundancy.

32:48You and I have told many jokes about Google's six messaging apps in the past. Are you focused on tightening up on more focused execution here? You know, yes. And the one thing I would say, look, I do think it's one of our strengths. It's not an accident we have 15 products with the scale we have or six products over 2 billion users each. You know, these are products for which we have committed for a long time. But clearly, we all are trying to do more with constraints now. Yeah. And areas where you can be more nimble, we've been very focused on that. And we've always done things, you know, at one point we had YouTube music and Google Play music.

33:29So I had to combine the two teams and said, no, you're going to be one music team. Yeah. Right. And so there's always moments like that. But that's the default for Google, right? Is you have multiple shots and you combine them in the end. In some cases, but you think about, I think people underestimate, you think about search or you think about maps or you think about photos or you think about Gmail, you think about workspace, you think about the focus we have had on cloud, you think about the fact we bought YouTube in 2006 and how we have executed since then to make YouTube what it is today. I think we have some high profile areas like messaging, But even there, if you look at our last few years, the focus on both Google Meet and Chat and the platform side of RCS, the fact we have relentlessly focused to start from zero.

34:14And I'm confident. I mean, we announced RCS is now over 800 million users. There was a big applause line yesterday. I think Dieter was the loudest cheer in the room. I heard him. I literally think, you know, I could pick out Dieter's applause from the others. But, you know, I think we are committed to being deeply focused. I mean, even AI is an example of that. We've been focused on AI for, you know, over a decade. And in the case of AI, it was a deliberate decision to have because how important it was, we were fine with having that exploration that came from two different teams because those teams had different strengths.

34:50Like deep mind, they're early believers in reinforcement learning. Yeah. In a way, Google wasn't. So to me, that diversity was important too. But there are moments where you say, hey, it's time to approach it a bit differently. But I think these are decisions you need to make. There's another challenge for Google inside of all this. If you believe it's a platform shift, this might be the first platform shift that regulators understand because it's very obvious what kind of labor will be displaced. Lawyers, mostly, is my gather. Like policy, they can see, okay, a bunch of white-collar labor will go away.

35:26Like a C-plus email about a transaction, entire floors of those people can be reduced. And they seem very focused on that risk. And then there's the general AI risk that we all talk about. When Google first did search, it was an underdog, right? And it won a lot of court cases along the way that built the internet. The Google Books case, the Image Search case with Perfect 10, the Viacom case with YouTube, right? It was an underdog, but it was obviously delivering a ton of value. Now you're at the White House having an AI summit. I'm confident you're going to end up in government, like capitals around the world talking about AI.

36:02Do you think you're in a different position now than that scrappy underdog inventing the internet? You're the incumbent. Are you playing a different role? Two parts to the question. On the first part, briefly, for 20 years of tech automation, people have predicted all kinds of jobs would go away. Movie theaters were supposed to end. They kind of did. But movies are thriving more than ever before. I don't know. It was a writer's strike. Like, right, I mean, the labor cost paid to riders has dropped so precipitously. They're on strike right now. I know, but there's been rider strike before, and those things will continue, right?

36:36There's always going to be, all I mean is, unemployment over the last 20 years of tech automation hasn't fully, 20 years ago, when people exactly predicted what tech automation would do. Yeah. There are very specific pronouncements of entire job categories, which would go away. It hasn't fully played out. So I think there's a chance that AI may actually, because I think the legal profession is a lot more than, you know, there's a chance, you know more about being a lawyer, which is why I can opine on it because I quite don't know a lot about it. But, you know, something tells me, you know, more people may become lawyers because the underlying reasons why law exists and legal systems exist aren't going to go away because those are humanity's problems, right?

37:20And so AI will make the profession better in certain ways, might have some unintended consequences, but I'm willing to almost bet 10 years from now, maybe there are more lawyers. I don't know, right? I don't know. But, you know, so it's not exactly clear to me how all this plays out. I think too often we think there are new professions constantly getting created. I don't mean too lightly. I do think there are big societal labor market disruptions that will happen. Governments need to be involved. There needs to be adaptations. Skilling is going to be important. But I think we should underestimate the beneficial side of some of these things too.

37:56And it's complicated, is maybe how I would say it. On your second question, governments, every legal system, should always have to grapple with the same set of problems. There's a new technology. It has a chance to bring unprecedented benefits. It has downsides. I think you're right with AI. People are more trying to think ahead than ever before, which gives me comfort because of some of the potential downsides to this technology. I think we need to think about it. We need to anticipate as early as we can. But I do think the answers for each of this is not always obvious to me, right? I think, you know, it's not clear to me you hold back AI in a straightforward way.

38:38That's not the right answer. It has geopolitical implications. So it's, again, a complex thing we will grapple with over time. I think from our standpoint, we are a bigger company. So I do think we will come to it in a more responsible way. There are places where we will engage and try to find what the right answers are. And so maybe our approach will be different for sure, I think, as we go through it. One of the things I think about a lot is that set of cases I talked about. Google Books or Viacom on YouTube, right? You were distributing more information than ever before. And there was a bunch of media companies who said, that's ours.

39:16You can't have it. And you had to go fight it out and just access the information. So valuable people that Google was able to win. This is a different turn, right? Publishers around the world, media people, Hollywood artists, Drake are saying, hey, that's mine. And you took it and you trained an AI on it. And now there's fake Drake singing songs on YouTube. And they're going to try to stop you, right? There's already copyright lawsuits. Do you think that you're, as the incumbent, you have a bigger responsibility to that conversation than some of the startups who might be running that original Google Playbook of saying, we're going to ask for forgiveness and not permission?

39:50I do think we have a bigger responsibility. So, you know, one of the things I think YouTube has done well, you know, I think with the work on content ID and, you know, I think it's brought a deep framework by which content right holders are, you know, that the system works. So I think our responsibility there is making sure that this new wave continues to help artists and the music industry. And so it's something we would think about deeply, I think, as we go through this. Do you think that you will have to share revenues with publishers and musicians? Because this is the thing they're worried about the most.

40:23I mean, in the case of YouTube, we already clearly directly do. But I also think it's important in these moments. We aren't the only player. These are big descriptions coming. our goal would be to help the music industry partner with them and help them. So that means maybe giving artists choice and control over transformative works and giving them a say in it and figuring out those right answers. Do you think you have to get ahead of the law? I mean, this is a question here, right? As you're saying, there's a lot of players. Maybe government should make it so Drake can get paid when AI Drake sings a song.

40:58Or do you think you have to get ahead of the law to be a good partner? We all have to meet where users are going and where trends are evolving. And so we plan to be, you know, when we say bold and responsible, I mean it. You will see us be bold in some of these cases. But underlying all that is a responsible direction. We want to get it right. Support for the show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, and you don't need to make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. Before you know it, you find yourself drowning in software and processes instead of focusing on what matters, growing your business.

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42:09Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

42:23Support for the show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, and you don't need to make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. Before you know it, you find yourself drowning in software and processes instead of focusing on what matters, growing your business. This is where Odoo comes in. It's the only business software you'll ever need. Odoo is an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything. That means CRM accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more. No more app overload.

42:51No more juggling logins. Just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part is that Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. It's built to grow with your business, whether you're just starting out or you're already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process. It's time to put the clutter aside and focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

43:27So I want to ask the biggest picture question of all. Google is 25. You've been the CEO. You took over from the founders. You turned into Alphabet. You've had a very intense and very successful run at Google, especially if you look at just the business. It's grown immensely. We've talked here about big decisions, right? Restructuring, appointing new leaders, moving people around, changing their culture to be more focused, navigating regular competitors, asking you to dance. All of that requires like a very particular kind of ambition and focus. So just for you personally, what is that ambition?

43:59What is driving you personally to take the company through this moment? You know, it's really from first principles, having clarity. I believe in our mission for me and getting access to technology made a big difference in my life. So the driving force for me has always been about bringing information and computing to more people to benefit society. And so out of that comes the clarity for all the stuff I need to do. So working from the first principle in some ways, then it becomes simpler. But it's an exciting time. Look, I've been preparing for this moment around AI for 10 plus years. It's not an accident at Google.

44:37you know, we brought Jeff Fintan in or we built Google Brain or we acquired DeepMind. We spend the investment that's needed. We built TPUs. We announced TPUs at IO maybe six years ago now. And so this is something I've anticipated for a long time. So to me, I'm excited that it's an inflection point. But to your earlier question, because we have been doing this for 25 years, we know how important it is to be responsible from day one, which is why at Google I.O. you heard about our early work on watermarking and metadata in images. I could have done an hour on metadata. You should be very happy that I did it.

45:19Some other time. But both parts are important, but it's an exciting time. Yeah. Well, Sundar, thank you so much for being on Decoder. I look forward to talking again soon. Thanks, Nalai. Appreciate it. Thanks again to Sundar Pichai for taking the time to chat today. And thank you for listening to Decoder. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, I want to hear what you think about Decoder. You can email us at decoderatheverge.com. We actually read all the emails. Or you can hit us up on Twitter and TikTok at DecoderPod. If you like the show, please send it to a friend and make sure you follow us wherever you get your podcasts.

45:49If you really like the show, hit us with that five-star review. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by Raghu Manavalan and Jackie McDermott. It was edited by Callie Wright. Decoder Music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. And our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. We'll see you next time.

46:11Support for the show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, and you don't need to make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. Before you know it, you find yourself drowning in software and processes instead of focusing on what matters, growing your business. This is where Odoo comes in. It's the only business software you'll ever need. Odoo is an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything. That means CRM accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more. No more app overload.

46:40No more juggling logins. Just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part is that Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. It's built to grow with your business, whether you're just starting out or you're already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process. It's time to put the clutter aside and focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

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