Building the Future: Sundar Pichai on A.I., Regulation and What’s Next for Google

Summary

Highlights

• Sundar Pichai discusses AI advancements and Google's competitive edge despite rapid industry evolution. 🚀
• Google maintains leadership with over 90% of the market share in search, yet faces antitrust scrutiny. 🔍
• AI regulation is debated, with a call for thoughtful, innovation-friendly approaches. 🧩
• The conversation touches on the evolving culture at Google, emphasizing mission-driven goals. 🌐
• Pichai reaffirms Google's commitment to AI, expecting significant progress by 2025. 🌟

Key Takeaways

• Google is deeply invested in AI, constantly pushing the boundaries of what's possible. 🤖
• Sundar Pichai is confident about AI's future but acknowledges its challenges and the competitive landscape. 🏆
• Antitrust issues are a significant concern, but Pichai focuses on innovation and the company's mission ahead. 💼
• The culture at Google is evolving, with a focus on mission-driven innovation rather than personal platforms. 🌍
• There's intrigue in how Google balances its massive influence with regulatory and competitive pressures. ⚖️

Overview

Building the Future: Sundar Pichai on A.I., Regulation and What’s Next for Google Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] oh
• 00:30 - 01:00 please welcome Andrew Ross sorin and his guest CEO of Google Sundar pacai SAR Pai is here everybody the CEO of course of alphabet and Google the leading uh one of I at least should say but probably the leading company one of the most influential uh and most scrutinized I should also mention in the
• 01:00 - 01:30 World under his leadership Google has now shaped a lot of our digital age as we know it in 2023 alphabet reported an astounding 37 billion that's a remarkable amount of money in Revenue uh its search uh maintains over a 90% global market share we'll talk about what that means in just a moment YouTube now boasts over 2.5 billion monthly logged in users Android Powers More than 70% of all smartphones worldwide so if you got an iPhone you're uh out of luck compared to what the rest rest of the
• 01:30 - 02:00 world is doing uh but we should mention the US government is now pursuing one of the most significant antitrust cases uh in decades it's accus Google of maintaining a monopoly power and is considering uh whether the company should be broken up we'll get into that uh as Sundar navigates all of this he is steering Google through also what is a rapidly changing technological world uh with AI and uh products like Gemini and this I should mention is sundar's second time on our stage and we're so thrilled
• 02:00 - 02:30 to have you here so thank you it's great to be here um there is like everything to talk about um and we're going to talk about Ai and technology and we'll talk about the government and culture and so many different things but I I think the best place to start if you'd indulge me is to talk about where we are we talked to Sam earlier about AI um but I wanted to specifically sort of start with you um on AI and Technology but maybe in a
• 02:30 - 03:00 bit of a different place um and I wanted to read you if I could a quote from a competitor of yours uh that I I don't think you're going to love but I think you you'll have have a good answer to uh which is your friend Sati nadela at Microsoft said that Google should have been the default winner in the world of big Tech AI race said Google's a very competent company
• 03:00 - 03:30 obviously they have both the talent and the compute they're vertically integrated they have everything from data to silicone to models to products and distribution and I'm so curious he sort of put down the put down the um the debate there or tried to launch a debate there about where Google is you guys were the origin The Originals you the ogs when it comes to Ai and sort of where you think you are in the journey relative to these other players and uh whether you think you were or still are
• 03:30 - 04:00 supposed to be as he says the default winner I would love to do a uh side by side comparison of Microsoft's own models and our models any day any time they they using someone else's models the gloves come off early and you're throwing down the gauntlet I'm just have a lot of respect for them and the team look it's a such a dynamic moment in the industry I obviously uh
• 04:00 - 04:30 when I look at what's coming ahead maybe are in the earlier stages of a profound shift you know we have taken such a deep full stack approach to AI uh you know we do world class research you know we are the most cited when you look at geni right most cited company in the institution in the world uh foundational research we build AI infrastructure and when I'm saying AI infrastructure all the way from we are
• 04:30 - 05:00 in our sixth generation of uh tensor processing units you mentioned our product reach we have 15 products at half a billion users we are building foundational models and and we give it use it internally we provide it to developers over 3 million developers and you know it's a deep full stack investment we are getting ready for our uh you know next generation of models I I just think there's so much Innovation ahead we are committed to being at the state of-the-art in this
• 05:00 - 05:30 field and I think we are um just coming today we just announced groundbreaking research on from a text and image prompt creating a 3D scene and so this is the frontier is moving pretty fast and you know so looking forward to 2025 but do you think to yourself I mean you guys were doing this with Demis and and Google Minds super early I mean you were the first yeah and do you look and now say everybody and this was actually something we talked about a little bit earlier this morning everybody's
• 05:30 - 06:00 catching up and getting to a similar place in the current you know the current generation of llm models are roughly you know a few companies have converged at the top but I think we're all working on our next versions too I think the progress is going to get harder when I look at 25 the lwh hanging fruit is gone you know the the curve uh that the hill is steeper I think the El teams will stand out in 25 uh so I think
• 06:00 - 06:30 it's an exciting Year from that perspective you think it's slowing down though so that's interesting because I will tell you that that your your competitor SLP uh in Sam Alman said there is no wall there is no wall you you think it's it's maybe slowing down in terms of how quickly that scales I I'm very confident there'll be a lot of progress in 25 okay I think the models are definitely going to get better at at reasoning completing a sequence of actions more reliably uh you
• 06:30 - 07:00 know more agentic if you will I think so you you will see as push the boundaries so I expect a lot of progress in 25 so I don't fully subscribe to the wall notion um but I but you know the when you when you start out quickly scaling up you can throw more comput and you can make a lot of progress but you're definitely going to need deeper breakthroughs as we go to the next stage so so you can perceive it as there's a wall or you perceive it as uh you know there's some small barriers
• 07:00 - 07:30 it's not just but this is what we were actually talking about this morning is it a pro how much of it is processing power meaning just physical processing power if you can buy enough Nvidia chips that that changes the dynamic for you versus how much data is coming new data is coming in whether it's real or Digital Data or uh synthetic data versus tweaking and changing the algorithm look everyone is going to get more Compu right you know for compute you're only
• 07:30 - 08:00 constrained by money right like Capital to do it I think there's a lot of capital around so I don't think processing power I mean I think first of all the current amount of compute we using is just an arbitrary number it's not like we're using a lot of compute there's no reason why it can't keep scaling up right uh so I think everyone will get more compute but I think where the breakthroughs need to come from where the differentiation needs to come from is uh is your ability to achieve
• 08:00 - 08:30 technical breakthroughs algorithmic breakthroughs how do you make the systems work uh you know from a planning standpoint or from uh reasoning standpoint how do you make these systems better those are technical breakthroughs ahead right how much do you think that again I mentioned Google sort of an OG in the space and now there's been this big competition how much do you think that you didn't move
• 08:30 - 09:00 you were not the first mover I mean you were the first mover and then not the first mover in this sort of uniquely interesting way how much is that a function of protecting the current business I think one of the great challenges that people talk about all the time is you have this enormous business called the Blue Link economy uh search and you want to that's $37 billion of Revenue not all of it but a lot of it and you do not want to hurt or cannibalize that business do you say to yourself as you're thinking about these
• 09:00 - 09:30 different AI possibilities and other things you know we got to be a little bit slower because we got this we got the we got we got to protect this other thing over here well look I think the area where we applied uh AI the most aggressively if anything in the company was in search right the gaps in search quality was all based on Transformers internally we call it Bert and Mom and you know we made search multimodal the search quality improvements we were improving the language understanding of search that's why build Transformers in
• 09:30 - 10:00 the company right so and if you look at the last couple of years we have uh you know with AI overviews Gemini is being used by over a billion users in search alone and I just feel like we are getting started search itself will continue to change profoundly in 25 uh I think we are going to be able to tackle more complex questions than ever before uh you know I think you'll be surprised even early in 25 the kind of newer things search can do compared to
• 10:00 - 10:30 where it is today so there's always you know when you're running in technology there's some version of innovators dilemma somewhere right there's only one answer to innovators dilemma every time you lean into that moment right and anything else you won't be around in a few years you think you've leaned in enough and I'm going to read you something and it's a little tough and you've probably read it Christopher mims in the journal yeah he says quote the company's Core Business is under siege people are increasingly getting answers from artif icial intelligence and he's
• 10:30 - 11:00 talking not necessarily about Gemini and he's saying younger Generations are using other platforms to gather information and that longer term He suggests that some of the results that are going to be delivered by search engines are the value of them is going to be deteriorating because they're going to be flooded this the web is going to be flooded with AI generated content look the multiple parts to the question in a world in which you flooded with like a lot of content sifting and in people you
• 11:00 - 11:30 know if anything I think you know something like search becomes more valuable in a in a world in which you're inundated with content you're trying to find trustworthy content uh content that makes sense to you in a way reliably you can use it I think it becomes more valuable to your previous part about there's a lot of information out there people are getting it in many different ways look information is the essence of humanity we've been on a curve on information when Facebook came
• 11:30 - 12:00 around you know people had entirely new way of getting information YouTube Facebook T I can keep going on and on through it right you know I think I think uh you know I think the problem with a lot of those constructs is they they are zero some in their inherent Outlook right they they just feel like people are consuming information in a certain limited way and people are all dividing that up but that's not the reality of what people are doing right so so if you were going to stack rank the competition now if you were to sit
• 12:00 - 12:30 on a Monday morning with a white board and say you know what not today but 2025 26 27 this is who we need to worry about this is what we think that they are capable of and this is what we are capable of yeah what does that board look like to you well two things I would say you know we had a few years ago when Alexa had launched and city had launched were exact versions of these questions only reason I'm saying it is there is now if if you're on The Cutting Edge of Technology it is so
• 12:30 - 13:00 Dynamic the answers if you were writing it in the board would keep changing too I genuinely think uh obviously on you know when I think about AI there are few major Labs which are investing a lot in so there are about five to six important companies I think the names are obvious to most people but let me ask you about that by the way because you think so they're obvious I don't know if they're obvious um I think chat GPT open AI That's obvious anthropic is obvious um you're
• 13:00 - 13:30 obvious increasingly maybe xai I don't know where you I think xai given elon's track record for sure uh meta has done a great job with llama right and where do you put apple and we're going to talk to Jeff Bezos in a little bit Amazon look I mean I mean these are extraordinary companies right so you know I have I mean we we partner with apple in certain areas and you know I expect both apple and Amazon just had an event yesterday
• 13:30 - 14:00 where they announced their own model so you know these are companies with deep capabilities and deep access to Capital and uh and extraordinary track record of execution uh which shows how Dynamic a moment is but I think it's a mistake to think for the most profound technology we are going to work on as Humanity there aren't going to be a handful of companies working on it right the the opportunity spaces much bigger than most people can process it today so let me ask you uh just maybe a management question yeah so
• 14:00 - 14:30 one of the the critiques has been that that Google has not been moving fast enough and that um the sort of Elon Musk approach to management of hard charging and going needs to needs to happen Mark Zuckerberg sort of took this sort of hard charging approach I was reading uh the late Charlie Munger uh had a comment he he had gone to visit alphabet before he passed away and he says' I've been to Google's headquarters it looked to me like a kindergarten a very rich
• 14:30 - 15:00 kindergarten and I thought it was a very interesting quote but I was thinking about it because it made me think um we've known each other uh maybe a decade now or more and I feel like you are a a you know a very uh thoughtful guy who's constantly thinking about all these things but I don't always necessarily think of you as a fighter what do you think about that look I you know uh the way to look you take something like way more where we are right like you know when you're working on
• 15:00 - 15:30 technology you have a clear vision and you're executing relentlessly and ambitiously you want to create a culture which can do that over over a long period of time I think there are many different ways to accomplish it um I just think you have to see the track record of what we' have done as a company and where we are headed you know just this year alone uh you know take take something like wayo as you know people used to question whether you can do this we kind of were at 50,000 rights like 6 months
• 15:30 - 16:00 ago 100,000 autonomous rights per week 150,000 last week it was 175 we crossed a million autonomous rights per week right like you go four weeks ago I took my dad in San Francisco and put him in the car he was in the front I was sitting in the back with my mom driving around San Francisco I mean to him you would have described as what we think of as AGI we kind of just crossed that in San Francisco the way more cars drive better than humans you
• 16:00 - 16:30 don't do these things by not executing well right so um when do you think weo is everywhere I mean we've been talking about I mean I think last time you were here we talked about autonomous vehicles and others uh including Elon have talked about them being on the roads a lot lot sooner than they are now I mean Tesla is making amazing progress too look I I think you know we are in six to seven cities already by the end of this year uh we've always kind of it's an area
• 16:30 - 17:00 where we have let safety and our metrics guide MH but I think we are already in the process may I just walk through the uh scaling up I think I think in the US by next year we'll be in like 10 cities robustly right and like in 10 of the major market so I think we're making good progress and who do you think of as the biggest competition in that space you know I think you know obviously uh you know Tesla is a leader in the space so I think it looks to me like uh you know Tesla Mo I would say those are the
• 17:00 - 17:30 top two how much of your time and I I I promise we'd get to it is spent these days on thinking about this legal case that you are the center of uh with the US government saying you're a monopoly and we are going to break you up they have talked about uh effectively uh trying to do a whole bunch of things spinning off chrome uh figuring out how to deal with Android um preventing you from paying folks like apple to make Google the default search engine on the phone look I I spent I spend the
• 17:30 - 18:00 vast majority of my time on Innovation and you know the product Innovation we need to do as a company uh but you know at our scale as a company you know it's a big part of my job to engage with regulators and you know viewed it as an important part of my role to do that from a legal standpoint look these are uh complex cases they are in the thick of it we have very very capable teams which work through it I you know I have I spent time but it's not an
• 18:00 - 18:30 extraordinary amount of time or something like that yeah but what do you think your chances are if you will I mean do you say to you I I don't know how much you want to speculate but there's a big question mark about if any of these things were to come to pass what it would do to the business look I mean I would say this even through the ruling uh the judge commented on um that we are clearly the highest quality search engine product out there and we've gotten to that position by innovating ahead of everyone El so in that is an acknowledgement of of
• 18:30 - 19:00 of uh you know what we've done to uh do well in this space we you just spent the first five minutes asking me about all the comp competition so there is something of a kind of a you know contrast there I would say well the question is whether it's an old case I mean right that that's the thing that I would that's I think today the big question given that I occasionally will now look at chat GPT or other services and find search results we always argued competition is a a click away
• 19:00 - 19:30 particularly on the internet and you know it is true I think and you know and I think ultimately look there's a consumer welfare standard like as consumers all this Innovation flowing out from Google uh you know as a company we are you know name any field we talked about self-driving AI Quantum Computing where are The Cutting Edge of innovation we provide these Services we open source and publish most of this innovation the entire AI recent you know the transform
• 19:30 - 20:00 architecture Etc a lot of her projects products are open source so you know so I we look we'll vigorously defend I can't comment on ongoing litigation but I have uh deep faith in our Judicial System let me ask you a related question which is that the president-elect uh has made a whole bunch of comments about Google talked about the need for competition but then is talked about the need to have strong
• 20:00 - 20:30 big technology companies to compete with China and suggested maybe that he would not be so inclined to want Google to be broken up have you talked to him about this I look mean nothing to do with the ongoing litigation at all but I I you know in my conversations with him he's definitely very focused on uh American competitiveness particularly in technology including AI um look I think there's a real opportunity in this
• 20:30 - 21:00 moment um one of the constraints for AI could be the infrastructure we have in this country including energy uh the rate at which we can build things I think there are real areas where I think um you know he is thinking about and committed to making a difference so hopefully we can make progress there but do you think that actually him becoming the president changes the dynamic for you meaning if if uh if Harris had won you think it would have been a different
• 21:00 - 21:30 outcome look I mean these are I mean this is a doj case and the case is already in court so you know and started under Trump uh yes and you know look I I so I don't have any particular insights into that right you know I think we'll defend ourselves there um but I just viewed as when I think the decade ahead you know AI ends up being the biggest opportunity ahead and so I'm focused on what we can do to innovate as a company and I think if we can do that well I
• 21:30 - 22:00 think our succcess is in our hands more than anything else you made a comment recently that um 25% of the software that's being written inside Google today is being ritten by AI which I thought was astonishing but it led to a question which I didn't see you answer yet which is has it changed how you hire inside of Google are you changing your hiring plans as a result of all this like to put up to put up fine print on the first part look I mean humans are writing the
• 22:00 - 22:30 code the AI systems are suggesting completions and you know 25% of the code that's checked in you know involves people accepting those suggestions right so but still away far away from in a pure way you can describe a problem in the AI writing the code or something like that look I literally don't think I think Engineers will be more productive than ever before more people can become programmers because I think the levels
• 22:30 - 23:00 of abstraction will increase over time just like blogging made the world of publishing not everyone needs to be as good as you to get online and and write something and I you know I feel the same with uh programming I think 10 years from now it'll be accessible to Millions more people but that may be true but do you think that a company like Google will need more or less Engineers programming meaning when you look even at your budget for next year when you guys are sitting around going 2025
• 23:00 - 23:30 hiring plan is X did that change over the last 12 months as you said well 25% of this can be done by or at least assisted by well we are definitely taking into account and you know constantly you all of us as companies are thinking about how to be more productive right you have to do that and AI is one of the most important ways we thinking about how to make the company more efficient and productive across not just across everything so factoring in
• 23:30 - 24:00 our growth plans is an assumption that our software Engineers will be more productive than ever before right so so that may on the margin have an impact but it's also being able to do more things so it's not that you're looking to hire less people but what can you accomplish with those people so you know think about it there are times for example we have to go and refactor our code just to keep the quality up it's the kind of work in which it's tough tough sometimes to convince a lot of people to go do it you know the AI
• 24:00 - 24:30 systems can help with that so I think about it as expanding the capability of what people can do um ask you about a former employee of yours because I think it's actually just a f I know you're getting worried now saying who's this former employee former employee is Jeffrey Hinton um who was really The Godfather of AI he was the true OG at he just won the Nobel Prize he just won the Nobel Prize uh for work that he was doing uh with you and he said in the New York Times that he
• 24:30 - 25:00 now regrets his life's work that was pretty profound said I console myself with the normal excuse if I hadn't done it somebody else would have and I I read that I remember thinking that is such a profound thing to say about somebody's life um who may have changed our lives forever and I'm curious what you think of that and whether you've had conversations with him about that and and be how how you
• 25:00 - 25:30 who's leading this company and doing this work considers it well first of all I think the world of Jeff and he I just saw him a few weeks ago he came by Google we toasted uh to his to his noble noble work and uh look we had this conversation even when he was leaving but uh I think he definitely feels and something which a lot of a share by the way you know I've said this many years ago I call this the most profound technology as profound as fire or electricity and I think it's going to
• 25:30 - 26:00 affect all walks of life and I think he's definitely of the opinion we need to think deeply about this technology as early as possible and get it right for the benefit of humanity and I think his concerns we may not and he's speaking up about it that's great look I I'm definitely on the optimistic side I you know when I think about the areas where this technolog is going to make a difference uh you you know for for people by now I think the other area
• 26:00 - 26:30 where we won Demis and John jumper won the noble was for Alpha full right where uh we used AI to uh solve protein folding predict protein folding better I mean those things are being used by people to discover better drugs right tackle problems like cancer and vaccines and so on so there are many many areas in which AI is going so I think technology is going to make progress and and and that Arc of progress is bigger
• 26:30 - 27:00 than any one person alone so you know no one person does he feel any better about it now do you think you've convinced him uh I think look I mean Jeff should speak for himself I think look he's proud of the work he has done he's just asking questions so that he just wants us all to think about the implications of this technology so here's this here's the other question which is I think you and Sam and so many others went to Washington in the past couple of years and said look just FYI this thing coming and there could be a lot of problems and
• 27:00 - 27:30 you should regulate this a lot of people in Tech said or you should be thinking about you know what to do about it do you have any sense that Washington or any other body uh maybe in Europe is genuinely going to regulate Ai and it sort of baffles my mind because we've been talking about regulating social media we were just talking with Prince Harry about social media and that and there's been no real regulation of any sort I'm not saying should be I'm just questioning whether you think there will be look um first of
• 27:30 - 28:00 all to be very clear we are early enough in this technology I would generally take a very pro-innovation approach there is a lot of Regulation already in place so take Healthcare MH it's a very regulated industry it's not like you can bring a treatment in uh without going through all the regulatory approvals so just because you're using AI doesn't change all of that right so you really want to be careful about what
• 28:00 - 28:30 additional regulation if anything you need at all right like you know you have to get your drugs approved to say established process to do that right so I would take AI is going to be used for everything from recommending a coffee shop next to you to maybe deciding your insurance to a help decision right so I think you know the phrase regulating AI can be overb right what does it mean but there'll be areas um look at the progress the models are the models are
• 28:30 - 29:00 getting more and more realistic around developing synthetic content M we are working on we have syti we have watermarking we all but you know it's a research area over time like how does society think about like deep fakes that cause real harm to individuals Etc like you know should you have some Notions me I think in financial industry of Notions of fraud right right so you know I think but but you have to be thought and deliberate and and be specific about
• 29:00 - 29:30 what you're trying to do what do you think about and we also talked about this earlier this morning and you have more content than anybody in this regard um the value of that content right you have my emails on Gmail you have uh if we if I've uploaded video or somebody else has uploaded video about me on YouTube uh you I'm sure people have cut and pasted articles uh that I've written or other things how should think about that and the value of it you
• 29:30 - 30:00 know it's very interesting because if you were if you were going to write a book you could go to the library and maybe read 30 books uh you could maybe go buy some other books and you could you could take all that information in your head and hopefully you footnote it or put in the bibliography but you could probably only do that once it'd be very hard for you to take all the information to learn it and then spit it out a million times you get to spit it out a million times a million times a day yeah and I I just wonder what the economics
• 30:00 - 30:30 of that should be for the folks that create it in the beginning look I uh it's a very important question um look I I think I think more than any other company look you know we for a long time through you know be in search making sure while it's often debated we spend a lot of time thinking about the traffic we send to the ecosystem even through the moment through the transition over
• 30:30 - 31:00 the past couple of years it's an important priority for us in YouTube we put a lot of effort into understanding and you know identifying content and with content ID and uh and creating monetization for creators I think I think those are important principles right I think um there's always going to be a balance between understanding what is fair use uh when a new technology comes versus how do you give value back proportionate to the value of the IP the hard work
• 31:00 - 31:30 people have put in but you think there should be different different rules around fair use in the in the AI era I me look these are important issues which I'm sure Congress the Supreme Court everyone is going to be in I think they will but they if they do they'll we late that's the thing right it'll this is all going to move this already moved it's already moved past us and that's so all this information has been hoovered up and people have learned from that and it to to the extent that there are folks
• 31:30 - 32:00 who use your services and other services they're beneficiaries of that but it's not clear that the original Creator is the beneficiary right now like it's so for example you the work we have done around music generation we primarily given it as tools for artists to use right it we've been deliberate we didn't put music generation in the hands of users right we are actually giving those as tools to creators that's how we are doing it in YouTube primarily right so I think we are going to be thoughtful in
• 32:00 - 32:30 how we approach these questions but I do think people will develop models around it uh you know yes economic models yeah look you give you spend a lot of money giving a lot of money to creators yes on YouTube for example yes yeah do you see a day where instead of the Blue Link economy if you will that you actually are going to be sending checks to creators that created even an idea or a fact that you were able to collect along the way I mean
• 32:30 - 33:00 down the line well we are licensing content for AI today right so we are we are doing that where we see value so interesting so you're but you're you're doing it one of the things is fascinating to me you're licensing data for example from Reddit right but what's so interesting about that is the folks on Reddit are just typing away for free it's a fascinating business model no but look we licens data from Reddit right we license data from AP we license data
• 33:00 - 33:30 from New York Times right and so you know we do it across the world in variety of ways but I think over time will there be models by which people can create there'll be a Marketplace in the future I think there'll be creators who will create for AI uhhuh models or something like that and get paid for it I I definitely think you know that's that's part of the future uh and people will figure it out um I want to ask you a a slightly different question
• 33:30 - 34:00 about being a CEO of a big company like this so I don't know if you going to remember this uh but when you were here last yeah uh there was a massive protest that was happening on your campus around women do you remember this yeah um of course and I spent uh probably too much of the interview uh asking you about that and how you felt about that and um there was a walk out affect on the campus at the
• 34:00 - 34:30 time and it feels like the culture has changed or that you have tried to distinctly change the culture inside of Google uh since then um and I I just want to know what that has been like um you know I was listening to uh Peter teal talking to Barry Weiss uh and he was saying that the valley has has decided uh that woke isn't is over effectively um in fact he said quote
• 34:30 - 35:00 behind closed doors every major founder and CEO knew the woke experiment had failed what do you think of that look I mean the way for for a few years now uh you know I as a company I feel like the values are enduring but your culture kind of needs to evolve with time right like you know there's a difference right you you have deep endearing values for a while I felt you know particular as the company grew a lot um you know we've
• 35:00 - 35:30 kind of doubled as a company in the last six years across every Dimension since I was last year so many new people coming in um you know we're fortunate as a company to have a Timeless Mission the first part of the conversation about how exciting all all of this is I feel like you know people come with a variety of personal opinions a workplace isn't where you can reconcile all those differences you're there because you believe in the mission and the best way we can impact the world is through the
• 35:30 - 36:00 products and services we built and so getting the getting our employees to be more Mission first and Mission focused the company is not your personal platform right and and and I I think that's been for me it's been a change for a while there are moments where we've reinforced it very strongly and but you know I think that's happened there was a period of time where if I had asked you about this or any of the CEOs here in the room they'd say the employees have the power now the employees have the the power now and we have to sort of go with what the
• 36:00 - 36:30 employees are doing and then something shifted and I don't know what you think it is that shifted in the last two or three years it may very well be the just business imperative of being competitive said you know what we're not doing this this way anymore look I mean look we have we we are very you know our employees have a uh strong voice in the company I've always seen it as a source of strength for the company so I don't see is a power Dynamic nly I actually think it's resonating with a lot of
• 36:30 - 37:00 employees too right I think you know the employees are also looking for they don't want always like you know in a workplace right to be starting our personal so you just think it got so out of hand that everyone it had its own backlash I I think uh business imperative people want to have impact through their work uh I think you know we can survey we see people are the happiest when they feel they're being productive and the work is being impactful and they're doing well right
• 37:00 - 37:30 that trumps other things right and so you know so in some ways maybe it's a set of factors coming together right uh but I do feel it's not like I don't see this as a imbalance between us and our employees it doesn't feel that way um it is a giant company as I mentioned do you ever think that the company would be better off divided up um not the products the way I just described but you know one of the reasons that the company was called alphabet changed from Google was this idea that there going to be all these different units and that technically
• 37:30 - 38:00 these units could effectively get spun off into other things that's what I think the market thought at one point and that has not really happened yet though maybe it will with something like whmo yeah look some of our other bets they are uh you know there are companies in our other bets which are they are set up at boards we have outside investors in right just we take a long-term View and you know do I expect in a 10-year time frame some of those to be independent public companies the answer is yes which ones
• 38:00 - 38:30 first uh I can't tell you today but you know it you know but I I I I do think uh you know here's a different one which one would you want to run look I personally yeah uh you're staying with the mother Chef you know yes you know look I I I deeply care about building seeing the journey through on AI right it's what in 2015 I set the company to be AI first it's why I was excited to be a CEO to and I think the next decade is going to be the most interesting there you
• 38:30 - 39:00 said you want to see it through yeah what does through look like what's the other side of through and how long is that um look I have I probably think about this differently than most of the people uh I think there's a lot of focus on AI what does the word mean uh ironically 10 years ago at Google we would have these debates I remember including with Larry Sergey like when will the Turing test be solved this was 2010 or so and you know there would be puts and takes on whether it's
• 39:00 - 39:30 less than five years 5 to 10 years and so on look we kind of cross the during test barrier no one speaks about it now to my earlier example on weo the fact that buo in San Francisco drives better than humans did we cross a threshold there no one even thinks about it that way in this audience people kind of get in the car on wayo and they don't think about that so I think asking these questions is but the more important question is are you know is the technology progressing rapidly yes will
• 39:30 - 40:00 it continuously do more things than what it's able to do today including in many tasks reach Advanced specialization and the answer is yes so that's going to happen in the next decade right so okay in the next decade then what does Google look like what is Google in in 10 years from now given all the competition we're just talking about all these other names that are trying to do what you're doing and everything else what is the will it will it will it have 90% market share in search will it have $37 billion in Revenue I'm assuming you want more look
• 40:00 - 40:30 I uh the last decade you know uh said the company to be deeply AI first right this is for us AI is not the llm is One Moment In Time right we are working on so many things in such a deep fundamental way pretty much it's it's the same piece of technology which improves search which improves YouTube which improves Cloud you know cloud and YouTube are over100 billion in revenue and 10 years ago these were in businesses for us us right it's what Pur Veo uh we have many many other bets too
• 40:30 - 41:00 so I I still think of us as a AI first company and I think if you're are at the Forefront of making progress with this technology bringing it in a bold and responsible way I think we'll do very well as a company well hopefully you'll be back before 10 years from now but we want to thank you for the conversation send up a chai everybody thank you so so much thank you thank you we're going to take a quick break when we come back Jeffrey B us