Google CEO Sundar Pichai and the Future of AI | The Circuit

We are in the Plex. This is the center of Google. Gosh, it's hard to rememberlife before Google. It changed literally everything. How we live, how wework, how we communicate, how we get literally anywhereon a Googly colored bike. Google has been the frontdoor of the internet for over two decades, and now there are so many doors.

Google may not be the first place you go for answers anymore, so what are they gonna do about it? Hello. Hi, Emily. So good to meet you again. Good to see you again. Thanks so much for having us here. Oh, likewise. I'm glad you chose a sunnyday to come on campus.

It's beautiful. Sundar Pichai is at a pivotal moment. He's the CEO of Google and its parent company, Alphabet, rising to the top after proving his medal as a talented productleader and peacemaker. He runs a tech giant that functions more like a micro country, overseeing businesses asconsequential as YouTube,.

DeepMind, Cloud, and, of course, Search. Pichai has been carefullycrafting a strategy that infuses AI into everycorner of the business. That deliberate planningwas met with a surprise from longtime rival Microsoft and OpenAI, whose chatbot seeminglyknocked Google off its perch and challenged its cultural relevance. ChatGPT set off a code red at Google, and an industry-wide fever pitch over AI.

Not seen since the dot-com boom. But for Pichai, the frenzy isjust part of the long game. I saw it's your 20th anniversary. That's right. It was last week. It crept upon me. Are you coffee or tea? I'll go for coffee. How about you?I'm gonna have a green tea. Does it feel like you'vebeen here for 20 years?.

Not quite. You know, time flies by. You know, I had my kids rightwhen I started Google too, so the whole thing just flew by. Google is famous for those out-of-the box job interview questions. Do you remember any of yours? Like, did you have to figure out how many golf balls fit in a school bus.

Or something like that? Thank God. No. You know, but, you know, Iremember very, very clearly I interviewed on April 1st, soit was April Fool's Day 2004. There was rumor. I didn't know whether ithad actually happened, but Gmail apparently had launched. So all my interviews were about Gmail. People wanted to know whatI thought of the product.

And it definitely wasn'ta joke? They launched it. They actually launched it, yeah. But I never allow, no products on April Fool's Day. I think it's too confusing. You just had a blowout quarter. The stock jumped more thanit has in a long time. Did that feel like alittle bit of vindication, or, as they say in cricket,.

Was that the bat talking? In many ways, you know, it felt we worked very hard toset up the company for that. You know, in 2016, one ofthe first things I did as CEO was to say the company should be AI first. To me, we are just getting started in the beginning of what I think will be a extraordinarydecade of innovation, and so I'm incredibly excited about it.

AI has been around for decades, but it seems like everythingis happening everywhere, all at once. How do you make sense ofthe frenzy and the scale? All tech cycles are this way, right? You know, the- But this one feels different. It feels bigger. Is it? It is bigger.

We still have long ways to go, but we are in the early stages of that. And so, you know, you're gonna feel thatexcitement, that frenzy, but I think we are prepared for it. So you kind of roll with the flow. You embrace it. How are you and your kidsexperimenting with AI at home? We use Google Lens for homework.

I don't want to get 'em in trouble, but the class allows you to do that. But sometimes he asks me for help on math. I dunno. Sometimes I'm lazy and Ipretend as if I'm thinking, but I'm also using Google Lens to kind of figure out the answer. You grew up in Chennai in India. What was it like at the kitchen table?.

Like, what got you here? My parents always emphasized, you know, learning and knowledge, and it's worked in some ways,Google with its mission, it always resonated very deeply with me. You know, I felt this quest for learning knowledge, et cetera. It's what the company is about, too. I grew in a middle-class family.

I perceived our life throughthe arrival of gadgets. We waited five years for a telephone. It was a rotary phone, but when it came to our home, you know, it changed everyone's lives. I remember getting our first television and suddenly being able to watch sports. You know, I used to bikea long way to school, but, you know, therewas no gear in the bike,.

And I had to go uphill. But then, after many years,I got a bike with gears, and, like, I'm like, “Wow,this thing make, you know, what a dramatic difference.” I never took technology for granted. And so that's what, you know, always been optimistic about how technologycan make a difference. You've been CEO now for a decade.

How have you changed in that time? I think the main thing is whenyou've done it for a while, you know, you get to understand patterns, so you're running into something, but there's a sense of deja vu, you know, you've seen it before. And so I think that helpsyou kind of pattern match and deal with it more effectively. But a lot of this is, you know,.

This scale, you haveso much coming at you, there's a lot of noise, andmost of it doesn't matter. So the ability to separatethe signals from the noise, pay attention to the few things that you need to pay attention to. And, you know, I think I've gotten betterat that over the years. I heard Sergey is backand working a bit on AI. What is the involvement ofLarry and Sergey these days,.

And what advice are they giving you? I talk to them regularly. Sergey is actually spendingmore time in the office. He's literally coding. And, you know, some of my fondestmemories over the last year is sitting with Sergey on large screen looking at lost curvesas we train these models. I think one of the advantages they have.

Is they're not caughtup in the day-to-day. And so sometimes, when Ihave conversations with them, it allows all of us to step back and look at the bigger picture, which I think is incredibly important when you run something at this scale. The decisions Pichai and Google make influence how billions ofpeople get information. And the nature of how users do that.

Is starting to change in the age of AI. This seems like a threat to Google, except the core technology being used by Google's competitors wasinvented by Google itself. Google researchersinvented the transformer, literally the T in GPT. Do you wish you capitalizedon that louder and sooner? We use transformers in Search. That's what led to largegaps in Search quality.

Compared to other products. So we have infused transformersacross our products. We have a chance to do thatbetter with generative AI and with the Gemini series of models. And there's gonna be morebreakthroughs in this field. But what is more important iswe are driving that progress. And if the new Google is onlygonna be more and more AI, you know, AI is super helpful sometimes, but sometimes it's still deeply wrong.

Where do you draw the line? I think part of what makesGoogle Search differentiator is while there are times we give answers, it'll always link to awide variety of sources. Now we've had answers in Searchnow for many, many years. We are just now usinggenerative AI to do that. So the links will live on. Yes, and, you know, I think it'll always be animportant part of Search.

There will be times whenthey want quick answers. My son is celiac, sowe did a quick question to see whether something is gluten-free. We just want to know. But often it leads to more things, and, you know, then youwant to explore more. I think understanding that,meeting all that needs is part of what makes Search unique. Some leading computer scientists.

Have said Search is gettingworse, more SEO spam, et cetera. Do you see their point? Anytime there's a transition, you get an explosion of new content, and AI is going to do that. So for us, we view this as the challenge, and I actually think, you know, there'll be people who will struggle to do that, right?.

So doing that well is what will define ahigh-quality product, and I think it's gonna be the heart of what makes Search successful. You make a ton of money on ads next to the links generated by searches. If a chatbot is givingyou answers and not links, and maybe more answersthan links sometimes, are we in the midst of an assault.

On Google's business model? So we've always found people want choices, including in commercial areas, and that's a fundamental need. And I think we've alwaysbeen able to balance it. As we are rolling outAI or views in Search, we've been experimenting with ads, and the data we see shows thatthose fundamental principles will hold true during this phase as well.

The images that Gemini initiallygenerated of Asian Nazis and Black founding fathers, you've said that was unacceptable. If you look at any picturesof the founding fathers, you're seeing old white men. People are calling this woke AI, and it's not just happening here, it's happening across the industry. How did the model generatesomething that it never saw?.

We are a company which serves products tousers around the world, and there are generic questions. For example, people come and say, “Show me images of school teachers, or doctors, or nurses.” We have people askingthis query from Indonesia or the US, right? How do you get it rightfor our global user base?.

Obviously, the mistakewas that we overapplied, including cases where itshould have never applied. So that was the bug, and, you know, so we got it wrong. Would you say it's likegood intentions gone awry? In this particular case, yes, right? I think, you know, we arerightfully held to a high bar, and I think we clearlytake responsibility for it, and we are gonna get it right.

How concerned are you about AI-generated content ruining Search? For example, the AI-generated selfie of the tank man in Tiananmen Square. It shows up in Google searchresults, but it never happened. The challenge for everyoneand the opportunity is, how do you have a notionof what's objective and real in a world where there's gonna be alot of synthetic content?.

I think it's part ofwhat will define Search in the next decade ahead, right? People often come toGoogle right away to see whether something they sawsomewhere else actually happen. It's a common pattern we see. We are making progress, but it's gonna be anongoing journey, right? You've got AI systems that are running out of training data.

You've got companiesturning to AI-generated data to train their models. Aren't there risks to that? Yes. I think that, you know, through it all, are you creating new knowledge? Are these models developingreasoning capabilities, right? Are you making progress in theintelligence of these models? I think those are the frontierswe need to prove that,.

You know, you can do thatby using these techniques. Is LLM technology nearing a plateau? I would be surprised if LLMs are the only thing wewould need to make progress. We are investing a lot ofcomputing and resources. Our AI research is talent in driving the next generationset of breakthroughs. It seems, when you lookat the big picture, like Google missed the bigmoment, and ChatGPT took it.

A new artificial intelligenceprogram called ChatGPT made its debut online. It's as revolutionary as the internet. The topic of today's bigtake is also Microsoft, and it's big bet on AI and how it just kind ofleapfrogged over Google and no one kind of knewabout it until now. If you could go back, what would you do differently?.

To be clear, I take a long-term perspective and say, when the internet just first came about, Google didn't even exist then, right? So we were in the firstcompany to do search, we were in the first company to do email, we were in the firstcompany to build a browser. So I view this AI as, you know, we are in theearliest possible stages.

Your leadership style hasbeen described as slow, and steady, and cautious,sometimes maybe too cautious, and you're often comparedto these other tech leaders who are moving fast and breaking things. How would you describe yourself? Look, the reality, Ithink, is quite different. One of the first thingsI did when I became a CEO was to pivot the companysharply to focus on AI as well as really invest more in YouTube.

And Cloud to build theminto big businesses. I think the larger the company is, you are making fewerconsequential decisions, but they need to be clear, and you have to point thewhole company to that. Part of that, at times, involvesbringing the company along. You build consensus because that's what allowsyou to have maximum impact behind those decisions.

I mean, any leader ina position like yours has to be willing to hear the criticism. And I'm not gonna makeyou read the mean tweets like they do on “Late Night,” but I do have a few. “Where is Google?” “Running things through legal.” “Google doesn't have onesingle visionary leader, not a one.”.

Do you think you're theright person to lead Google? Look, it's a privilegeto lead the company. You know, people tend tofocus in this micro moment, but it is so small in thecontext of what's ahead, and, you know, when I lookat the opportunities ahead across everything we do, and for the first time, all of that has a calm andleveraged technology with AI. You know, I put a lot of chips,.

At least from my perspective on Google. So can you walk through campuswithout getting stopped? It's definitely been nice to walk and see people, you know,so I enjoy it a lot. I see a dinosaur statue in the distance, which I think is a good reminder. Like, how much do you worryabout becoming a dinosaur in a world where technologyis moving so quickly? I mean, in technology, I think,.

If you don't innovate to stay ahead, I think that's the inevitablefate of any company. No dinosaurs?Not yet. Well, they were great, but you know, you don't want, you don't want to have the same fate. How much has this AImoment forced you to move and think differently? Because it does seem like you'replaying defense sometimes.

We have been preparingfor this for a while. You know, a lot of the foundation of breakthroughs in thefield came from Google. So to me, this moment hasbeen over the past year, really channeling thecompany to meet the moment. There they are. The I/O tents. I/O tent. For one time a year, we get to pretend as ifwe are on a concert stage,.

Except we are speaking about technology. So Google I/O is sort of astate of the Google Union. What is the key message this year? It's less about, youknow, particular product, more about the journey we are on, the vision we have for how AIcan transform our products, and how we can bring it. Alphabet used to be thought of as this collection of moonshots,.

But a lot of those projectshave been spun off, or folded back into Google, or shut down. How should we think about Alphabet today? What is the new Google? When we think about bothacross Google and Alphabet, the underlying bet is the same. You're going to invest in deep technology and computer science and apply it to solve problems for people.

So I think that part doesn't change. When you take big, large-scale bets, by definition, you'renot aiming big enough if you don't have a few failures. When you go back to the S-1, Google said, “We're nota conventional company. You can spend 20% of yourtime on personal projects.” Google created this bottoms up culture where everyone has a voice,and it's super transparent,.

And the perks are great too. But did it go too far? Like, did it become anentitlement culture? Part of what makes Googleunique is, I think, there is a culture ofvibrant, open debate. And so I think it's superimportant to preserve that. I think we are also a company where employees havemany ways to speak up, and I think that's madethe company better.

Google, Google, you can't hide. Google, Google, you can't hide. You recently fired Google employees who were protesting this contract with the Israeli governmentfor cloud services. It seemed like a distinctchange in tone for a company that's historicallywelcomed all kinds of views. Why did you take this stand? I think when we have cases,including in this case.

Where a few employees, you know, cross beyond what's in the code of contact and disrupt the productivityof the workplace, or do so in a way that it makes otherpeople feel uncomfortable, I think we have to take action, and that's what we are doing. It has nothing to do with thetopic they are discussing. It's about the conduct ofhow they went about it.

Over the past years, through the pandemic, the company has grown a lot. There are a lot of new people. I view, particularlyin this moment with AI, the opportunity we haveahead of us is immense, but it needs a real focus on our mission. There have been multiplerounds of layoffs. Why take this approach? Why not cut once and cut deep?.

We are reallocating peopleto our highest priorities. There are cases whereyou're simplifying teams, you're moving people tofocus on newer areas, removing layers so thatyou can improve velocity. So that's why we have taken the time to do it correctly and well. Microsoft is obviouslymaking huge investments in AI as well. OpenAI, Inflection, Mistral.

We've reported thattheir OpenAI investment was actually in part becausethey were worried about Google and wanted to catch up. How do you feel about the competition? I've always held a view if you're working in the technology space, there is a lot of competition. We see it all the time. The way you stay ahead isby innovating relentlessly.

It has to be true all the time. It's happening at a faster pace. But, you know, technology, changes tend to get faster over time, so it's not surprising to me at all. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadellahas had some fighting words. I hope that with our innovation, they will definitely want to come out and show that they can dance.

And I want people to knowthat we made them dance, and I think that'll be a great day. Who's really choosing the dance music? I think one of the waysyou can do the wrong thing is by listening to noise out there and playing to someone else's dance music. I've always been very clear. I think we have a clearsense of what we need to do. So you're listening to your own music.

That's exactly right. Google is facing a tonof regulatory pressure in the US, abroad, overyour dominance in Search, video, ads, the app store. Some other big companieshave split themselves up to focus on their core. Has Google thought about that? A lot of our products integrate in a way that provides value for our users.

So I think that is important. Part of what allows us to compete in the Google Cloud market is our, the investment in AI we undertook because of Search is whatallows us to take that and compete hard againstother larger companies, like Amazon and Microsoft, in Cloud. So I would argue that the way we are approachingit drives innovation.

And adds choice in the market. What do you think is the future or potential of AI-powered hardware, and what will Google's role in it be? I think with AI, you get a chance to rethink that experience over the next few years. I still see the center of where the AI innovationwill happen in smartphones,.

Followed by glasses, right? That's how I see it. Last time we talked, you told me China will beat the forefront of AI. How should policymakers factorthat into their decisions? I think over time we needto develop frameworks by which we achieve globalcooperation to achieve AI safety. I know it sounds farfetched now, but we've done it in other areas,.

Like nuclear technologyand so on, to some extent. I think we are gonnaneed framework like that. And so I would expect, over time, there needs to be engagement with China on important issues like AI safety. Artificial general intelligence. What does it mean to you? Do we get there and when? It's not a well-defined phrase,.

It means different thingsto different people. But I think if you defineAGI as AI becoming capable across a wide variety of economic activity and being able to do it well, I think that's one way to look at it. So Google's gonna get us to AGI? You know, we are committed to making foundationalprogress towards AGI in a bold and responsible way.

And so, you know, I'll focus on the effort todo that and do that well. You've said there's evensome things about AI that you don't understand. Will AI always be somewhat in a black box? I have a little bit of acounterintuitive view there. I think, you know, humansare very mysterious, too. Often, when people explainwhy they did things, you know, they're telling something,.

It's not entirely clear. Today, we can't make senseof many complex systems. AI will give us more insights and more visibility intomany complex things. When I asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman why we should trust him, he said. You shouldn't. Why should we trust Google? Well, I share the notion that no one,.

You shouldn't blind lead, you know? That's why it's importantto have systems in place. Regulation has a part to play, you know, test balance innovation. But as these AI systems get more capable, it shouldn't just be based on a system of trust people or trust companies. We've talked a lotabout the opportunities. What is the biggestthreat to Google's future?.

I view for all companies, particularly, you know, at scale, you know, the biggest threatis not executing well. Is there a healthy dose of paranoia? Like not becoming Stanthe T-Rex out there? I think that, you know, there's a part of me which hasalways internalized, I think, the old Andy Grove phase,”Only the paranoid survive.” That is important.

And I think this moment is no different. Are we gonna look back onthis LLM era and laugh? Like, is this gonna all lookso basic and rudimentary? I hope we do because that shows, you know, you know, my kids aren'timpressed by touchscreens or the fact that they havethis extraordinary amount of computing in their hands. So similarly, you know, there's no reason we wouldn't scale up.

Our computing a hundredthousand times in a few years. So, yes, you know, I hope some of this lookslike a toy in the future. I hope it is that way, otherwise,we didn't do our job well. Thank you so much. That was so awesome. She's more difficult thanany AI to deal with, right? Oh, man.

Sharing is caring!