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Sundar Pichai on A.I., Regulation and What’s Next for Google
00:40:46
The chief executive of Google and its parent company Alphabet said that making progress in artificial intelligence was going to get harder in 2025 and that A.I. development was slowing down. He also discussed the landmark antitrust cases in the U.S. and his recent discussions with President-elect Trump.
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- [00:03]
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Sundar Pichai
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Sundar Pichai
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Sundar Pichai
When I look at what's coming ahead, maybe you're in the earliest stages of a profound shift. I just think there's so much innovation ahead. We are committed to being at the state of the art in this field, and I think we are.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
This is Andrew Ross Sorkin with the New York Times. And you're listening to interviews from our annual Dealbook Summit Live event recorded on December 4th in New York City. Sanjar Pichai is here, everybody. The CEO, of course, of Alphabet and Google. The leading one of I at least should say, but probably the leading company, one of the most influential and most scrutinized, I should also mention, in the world. Under his leadership, Google has now shaped a lot of our digital age as we know it. In 2023, Alphabet reported an astounding $307 billion. That's a remarkable amount of money in revenue. Its search maintains over 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 out of luck compared to what the rest of the world is doing. But we should mention the US Government is now pursuing one of the most significant antitrust cases in decades. It's accused Google of maintaining a monopoly power and it is considering whether the company should be broken up. We'll get into that. As Sundar navigates all of this, he is steering Google through also what is a rapidly changing technological world with AI and products like Gemini. And this, I should mention, is Sundar's second time on our stage. And we're so thrilled to have you here. So thank you.
- [02:22]
Sundar Pichai
It's great to be here.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
There is like everything to talk about 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 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, but I wanted to specifically start with you on AI and technology. But maybe in a bit of a different place. I wanted to read you if I could, a quote from a competitor of yours that I don't think you're going to love but I think you'll have a good answer to, which is your friend Satya Nadella at Microsoft said that Google should have been the default winner in the world of big tech's AI race. He said Google's a very competent company. Obviously they have both the talent and the compute. They're vertically integrated. They have everything from data to silicon to models to products and distribution. And I'm so curious. He sort of put down the, put down the, the debate there or tried to launch a debate there about where Google is. You guys were the original, the originals. You were the OGs when it comes AI and sort of where you think you are in the journey relative to these other players and whether you think you were or still are supposed to be, as he says, the default winner.
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Sundar Pichai
I would love to do a side by side comparison of Microsoft's own models and our models any day. Anytime they're using someone else's models, the.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
Gloves come off early and you're throwing down the gauntlet.
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Sundar Pichai
I don't know, I'm just, I have a lot of respect for them and the team. Look, it's such a dynamic moment in the industry when I look at what's coming ahead. Maybe you're in the earliest stages of a profound shift. We have taken such a deep full stack approach to AI. We do world class research. We are the most sighted. When you look at Genais, most cited company in the institution in the world, foundational research people, AI infrastructure. And when I'm saying AI infrastructure all the way from silicon. We are in our sixth generation of tensor processing units. You mentioned our product reach. We have 15 products at half a billion users. We are building foundational models and we use it internally. We provide it to developers, over 3 million developers. And it's a deep full stack investment. We are getting ready for our next generation of models. I just think there's so much innovation ahead. We are committed to being at the state of the art in this field and I think we are just coming. Today we just announced groundbreaking research from a text and image prompt creating 3D scenes. Pretty amazing. The frontier is moving pretty fast. You know. So looking forward to 2025 but do.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
You think to yourself, I mean you guys were doing this with Damis and Google minds super early. I mean you were the first.
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Sundar Pichai
Yeah.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
And you look and now say everybody and this is actually something we talked about a little bit earlier this morning. Everybody's catching up and getting to a similar place.
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Sundar Pichai
The current generation of LLM models are roughly in. A few companies have converged at the top, but I think they're all working on our next versions too. I think the progress is going to get harder when I look at 25, the low hanging fruit is gone, the hill is steeper. I think the elite teams will stand out in 25. I think it's an exciting year from that perspective.
- [06:16]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
You think it's slowing down though? That's interesting because I will tell you that your competitor, peer in Sam Altman said there is no wall. There is no wall. You think it's maybe slowing down in terms of how quickly that scales?
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Sundar Pichai
I'm very confident there'll be a lot of progress in 25.
- [06:33]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Okay.
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Sundar Pichai
I think the models are definitely going to get better at reasoning, completing a sequence of actions more reliably, more agentic, if you will. I think so. You will see us push the boundaries. So I expect a lot of progress in 25. So I don't fully subscribe to the wall notion, but when you start out quickly scaling up, you can throw more compute 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 you can perceive it as there's a wall or you perceive it as there's some small barriers.
- [07:11]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
So it's not just. But this is what we were actually talking about this morning. 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 new data is coming in, whether it's real or digital data or synthetic data versus tweaking and changing the algorithm.
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Sundar Pichai
Look, everyone is going to get more compute for compute. You're only constrained by money, like capital to do it. I think there's a lot of capital around, so I don't think processing power. I think first of all, the current amount of compute we are using is just an arbitrary number. It's not like we're using a lot of compute. There's no reason why we can't keep scaling up. Right. 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 your ability to achieve technical breakthroughs, algorithmic breakthroughs. How do you make the systems work from a planning standpoint or from reasoning standpoint? How do you make these systems better? Those are technical breakthroughs.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
Ahead Google, sort of an OG in this space. And now there's been this big competition. 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 business called the blue link economy, search, and you want to. And that's $307 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 different AI possibilities and other things, no, we got to be a little bit slower because we got to protect this other thing over here.
- [09:06]
Sundar Pichai
The area where we applied 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 we made search multimodal. The search quality improvements. We were improving the language understanding of search. That's why we built transformers in the company. If you look at the last couple of years with AI overviews, Gemini is being used by over a billion users in search alone. I just feel like we are getting started. Search itself will continue to change profoundly. In 25, I think we are going to be able to tackle more complex questions than ever before. I think you'll be surprised Even early in 25, the kind of newer things search can do compared to where it is today. So there's always, when you're running in technology, there's some version of innovators dilemma somewhere. There's only one answer to innovators dilemma every time you lean into that moment. Anything else, you won't be around in a few years.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
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 and he says, quote, the company's core business is under siege. People are increasingly getting answers from artificial intelligence. And he's 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. The web is going to be flooded with AI generated content.
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Sundar Pichai
Look, the multiple parts of the question, in a world in which you flooded with a lot of Content sifting and providing people. If anything, I think something like search becomes more valuable in a world in which you're inundated with content. You're trying to find trustworthy 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. Information is the essence of humanity. We've been on a curve on information. When Facebook came around, people had entirely new way of getting information. YouTube, Facebook, I can keep going on and on through it. I think the problem with a lot of those constructs is they are zero sum in their inherent outlook. Right. 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.
- [11:50]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
So if you were going to stack rank the competition now, if you were to sit on a Monday morning with a whiteboard and say, you know what, not today but 20, 25, 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.
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Sundar Pichai
Yeah.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
What does that board look like to you?
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Sundar Pichai
Well, two things I would say, you know, we had a few years ago when Alexa launched and Citi had launched very exact versions of these questions. The only reason I'm saying it is, you know, if you're on the cutting edge of technology, it is so dynamic, the answers, if you were writing it in the board, would keep changing too. I genuinely think obviously on, you know, when I think about AI, there are a 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.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
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. I think chatgpt, OpenAI, that's obvious. Anthropic is obvious. Your obvious increasingly maybe Xai, I don't know where you.
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Sundar Pichai
I think Xai, given Elon's track record for sure Meta has done a great job with Llama. Right.
- [13:04]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
And where do you put Apple? And we're going to talk to Jeff Bezos in a little bit. Amazon.
- [13:09]
Sundar Pichai
Look, I mean these are extraordinary companies, right. So you know, maybe we partner with Apple in certain areas and you know, I expect both Apple and Amazon just had an event yesterday where they announced their own models. So, you know, these are companies with deep capabilities and deep Access to capital and extraordinary track record of execution, 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. The opportunity space is much bigger than most people can process it today.
- [13:50]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Let me ask you just maybe a management question. So one of the critiques has been that, that Google has not been moving fast enough and that 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 the late Charlie Munger at a comment he had gone to visit Alphabet before he passed away. He says, I've been to Google's headquarters. It looked to me like a kindergarten, a very rich kindergarten. And I thought it was a very interesting quote. But I was thinking about it because it made me think. We've known each other maybe a decade now or more. And I feel like you are a very 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?
- [14:45]
Sundar Pichai
You take something like way more where we are, right? Like, you know, when you're working on technology, you have a clear vision. You're executing relentlessly and ambitiously. You want to create a culture which can do that over a long period of time. There are many different ways to accomplish it. 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, take something like Waymo. People used to question whether you can do this. We kind of were at 50,000 writes like six months ago. 100,000 autonomous writes per week. 150,000. Last week it was 175. We crossed a million autonomous rights per week. Four weeks ago I took my dad in San Francisco. I put him in the car. He was in the front. I was sitting in the back with my mom driving around San Francisco. 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 don't do these things by not executing well.
- [15:53]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
We'll be right back.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
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- [17:25]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
When do you think Waymo 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, including Elon, have talked about them being on the roads a lot sooner than they are now.
- [17:38]
Sundar Pichai
I mean Tesla is making amazing progress too. Look, I think we are in six to seven cities already by the end of this year. We've always kind of it's an area where we have let safety and our metrics guide. But I think we are already in the process. May I just walk through the scaling up? I think in the US by next year we'll be in like 10 cities robustly. Right. And like in 10 of the major markets. So I think we are making good progress.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
And who do you think of as the biggest competition in that space?
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Sundar Pichai
You know, I think, you know, obviously you know, Tesla is the leader in this space. So I think it looks to me like, you know, Tesla, Waymo, I would say those are the top two.
- [18:20]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
How much of your time and I promise we get to it is spent these days on thinking about this legal case that you are the center of with the US government saying you're a monopoly and we are going to break you up. They have talked about effectively trying to do a whole bunch of things, spinning off chrome, figuring out how to deal with Android, preventing you from paying folks like Apple to make Google the default search engine on the phone.
- [18:49]
Sundar Pichai
Look, I spend the vast majority of my time on innovation and the product innovation we need to do as a company. But at our scale as a company, it's a big part of my job to engage with regulators and view it as an important part of my role to do that from a legal standpoint. Look, these are complex cases. They are in the thick of it. We have very, very capable teams which work through it. I spend time, but it's not an extraordinary amount of time or something like that.
- [19:21]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Yeah, but what do you think your chances are, if you will? I mean, do you say to you, 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.
- [19:32]
Sundar Pichai
Look, I mean I would say this even through the ruling, the judge commented on that we are clearly the highest quality search engine product out there and we've got into that position by innovating ahead of everyone else. So in that it's an acknowledgment of what we have done to do well in this space. You just spend the first five minutes asking me about all the competition. So there is something of a, kind of a contrast there, I would say.
- [20:04]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Well, the question is whether it's an old case. I mean that's the thing that I would, that's, I think today the big question given that I occasionally will now look at ChatGPT or other services and, and find search results.
- [20:17]
Sundar Pichai
Look, we've always argued competition is a click away, particularly on the Internet. And it is true, I think, and I think ultimately, look, there's a consumer welfare standard as consumers. All this innovation flowing out from Google as a company we are name any field. We talked about self driving AI, quantum computing. We are the cutting edge of innovation. We provide these services, we open source and publish most of this innovation, the entire AI reason, you know, the transformer architecture, et cetera. A lot of our products are open source. So you know, so I will look, we'll vigorously defend. I can't comment on ongoing litigation, but I have deep faith in our judicial system.
- [21:05]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Let me ask you a related question which is that the President Elect has made a whole bunch of comments about Google, talked about the need for competition, but then has talked about the need to have strong 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.
- [21:33]
Sundar Pichai
Nothing to do with the ongoing litigation at all. But I, you know, in my conversations with them, he's definitely very focused on American competitiveness, particularly in technology, including AI. Look, I think there's a real opportunity in this moment. One of the constraints for AI could be the infrastructure we have in this country, including energy, the rate at which we can build things. I think there are real areas where I think, you know, he's thinking about and committed to making a difference. So hopefully we can make progress there.
- [22:11]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
But do you think that actually him becoming the president changes the dynamic for you? Meaning if, if, if Harris had won, do you think there would have been a different outcome?
- [22:20]
Sundar Pichai
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. Yes. And, you know, look, I. So I don't have any particular insights into that. Right. I think we'll defend ourselves there, but I just view it as, when I think the decade ahead, 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 think our success is in our hands more than anything else.
- [22:51]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
You made a comment recently that 25% of the software that's being written inside Google today is being written 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?
- [23:16]
Sundar Pichai
To put a fine print on the first part? Look, I mean, humans are writing the code, the AI systems are suggesting completions, and 25% of the code that's checked in involves people accepting those suggestions. But we are still far away from 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 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 write something. And I feel the same with programming. I think 10 years from now, it'll be accessible to millions more people.
- [24:07]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
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, 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.
- [24:29]
Sundar Pichai
Assisted by, we are definitely taking into account and constantly, all of us, as companies are thinking about how to be more productive, you have to do that. AI is one of the most important ways we are thinking about how to make the company more efficient and productive across. Not just across everything. So factoring in our growth plans is an assumption that our software engineers will be more productive than ever before. Right. 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 sometimes to convince a lot of people to go do it. The AI systems can help with that. So I think about it as expanding the capability of what people can do.
- [25:24]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Let me ask you about a former employee of yours, because I think it's actually just a fact. I know you're getting worried now, saying, who's this former employee? Former employee is Geoffrey Hinton, who is really the godfather of AI. He was the true og he just.
- [25:39]
Sundar Pichai
Won the Nobel Prize.
- [25:40]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
He just won the Nobel Prize for work that he was doing with you. And he said in the New York Times that he now regrets his life's work. That's pretty profound. He said, I console myself with the normal excuse, if I hadn't done it, somebody else would have. And I read that. I remember thinking, that is such a profound thing to say about somebody's life 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 B, how you, who's leading this company and doing this work, considers it.
- [26:23]
Sundar Pichai
Well, first of all, I think the world of Jeff and I just saw him a few weeks ago. He came by Google, we toasted to his noble work, and look, we had this conversation even when he was leaving. But I think he definitely feels, and something which a lot of us share, by the way, 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 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. I think he has concerns we may not and he's speaking up about it. That's great. Look, I'm definitely on the optimistic side when I think about the areas where this technology is going to make a difference. By now, I think the other area where we won Demis and John Jumper won the Nobel was for AlphaFold, where we used AI to 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 that arc of progress is bigger than any one person alone. So no one person.
- [27:52]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Does he feel any better about it now? Do you think you've convinced him?
- [27:57]
Sundar Pichai
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.
- [28:08]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
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's coming and there could be a lot of problems and 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, 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 there should be. I'm just questioning whether you think there will be.
- [28:49]
Sundar Pichai
First of 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. Take healthcare. It's a very regulated industry. It's not like you can bring a treatment in without going through all the regulatory approvals. Just because you're using AI doesn't change all of that. Do you really want to be careful about what 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 health decision. Right. So I think the phrase regulating AI can be overbought. Right? What does it mean? But there'll be areas look at the progress. The models are getting more and more realistic around developing synthetic content. We are working on. We have synth id, we have watermarking, but it's a research area over time. How does society think about deep fakes that cause real harm to individuals, et cetera? Should you have some notions? I think in financial industry you have notions of fraud, but you have to be thoughtful and deliberate and be specific about what you're trying to do.
- [30:17]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
What do you think about? And we also talked about this earlier this morning and you have more content than anybody in this regard. The value of that content. You have my emails on Gmail, if I've uploaded video or somebody else has uploaded video about me on YouTube, I'm sure people have cut and pasted articles that I've written or other things. How should we think about that and the value of it? It's very interesting because if you were going to write a book, you could go to the library and maybe read 30 books, you could maybe go buy some other books and 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 day. I just wonder what the economics of that should be for the folks that created in the beginning.
- [31:24]
Sundar Pichai
It's a very important question. Look, I think, I think more than any other company, look for a long time through be it 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 the past couple of years. It's an important priority for us. In YouTube, we put a lot of effort into understanding and identifying content with content ID and creating monetization for creators. I think those are important principles, right? I think there's always going to be a balance between understanding what is fair use when a new technology comes versus how do you give value back proportionately to the value of the ip, the hard work people have put in.
- [32:14]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
But you think there should be different, different rules around fair use in the, in the AI era.
- [32:19]
Sundar Pichai
I mean, look, these are important issues which I'm sure Congress, the Supreme Court, everyone is going to weigh in.
- [32:26]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
I think they will. But if they do, they'll be late. That's the thing. This is all going to move. This already moved. It's already moved past us. All this information has been Hoovered up. And people have learned from that. To the extent that there are folks 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.
- [32:53]
Sundar Pichai
Like, it's so, for example, you know, the work we have done around music generation, we have primarily given it as tools for artists to use.
- [33:02]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Right.
- [33:02]
Sundar Pichai
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 how we approach these questions. But I do think people will develop models around it, you know.
- [33:20]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Yes. Economic models.
- [33:21]
Sundar Pichai
Yeah.
- [33:22]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Look, you spend a lot of money giving a lot of money to creators.
- [33:26]
Sundar Pichai
Yes.
- [33:27]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
On YouTube, for example.
- [33:28]
Sundar Pichai
Yes. Yeah.
- [33:29]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
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.
- [33:44]
Sundar Pichai
Way down the line? Well, we are licensing content for AI today, so we are doing that where we see value.
- [33:51]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
So interesting. But you're doing it. One of the things that's fascinating to me, you're licensing data, for example, from Reddit. But what's so interesting about that is the folks on Reddit are just typing away for free. It's a fascinating business model.
- [34:08]
Sundar Pichai
But look, we license data from Reddit, we license data from ap, we license data from New York Times. Right. And so, you know, we do it across the world in a 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 models or something like that and get paid for it. I definitely think that's part of the future and people will figure it out.
- [34:41]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
I want to ask you a slightly different question about being a CEO of a big company like this. I don't know if you're going to remember this, but when you were here last, there was a massive protest that was happening on your campus around women. Do you remember this?
- [35:01]
Sundar Pichai
Yeah, of course.
- [35:03]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
And I spent probably too much of the interview asking you about that and how you felt about that. And there was a walkout effectively, on the campus at the time. And it feels like the culture has changed or that you have tried to distinctly change the culture inside of Google since then. And I just want to know what that has been like. I Was listening to Peter Thiel talking to Barry Weiss, and he was saying that the Valley has decided that Wokeism is over, effectively. In fact, he said, quote, behind closed doors, every major founder and CEO knew the Woke experiment had failed. What do you think of that?
- [35:52]
Sundar Pichai
For a few years now, as a company, I feel like the values are endearing, but your culture needs to evolve with time. There's a difference. You have deep, endearing values. For a while, I felt particularly as the company grew a lot. We've doubled as a company in the last six years across every dimension since I was last year. So many new people coming in. We are fortunate as a company to have a timeless mission. The first part of the conversation about how exciting all of this is. 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 products and services we build. And so getting our employees to be more mission first and mission focused. The company is not your personal platform. Right. And 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. But, you know, I think that's how life happened.
- [36:58]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
There was a period of time where if I had asked you about this or any of the CEOs who are in the room, they'd say the employees have the power now. The employees have the power now. And we have to sort of go with what the 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.
- [37:25]
Sundar Pichai
Our employees have a strong voice in the company. I've always seen it as a source of strength for the company. So I don't see it as a power dynamic. Nestle. I actually think it's resonating with a lot of employees too. The employees are also looking for. They don't want always in a workplace to be sorting out personal.
- [37:46]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
So you just think it got so out of hand that everyone it had its own backlash.
- [37:49]
Sundar Pichai
I think business imperative people want to have impact through their work. I think 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. That trumps other things. So in some ways, maybe it's a set of factors Coming together. 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.
- [38:15]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
It is a giant company, as I mentioned. Do you ever think that the company would be better off divided up? Not the products the way I just described, but one of the reasons that the company was called Alphabet changed from Google was this idea that there were going to be all of these different units and that technically 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 Waymo.
- [38:42]
Sundar Pichai
Yeah, look, some of our other bets, there are companies in our other bets which they are set up with boards we have outside investors in just we take a long term view. And do I expect in a 10 year time frame some of those to be independent public companies? The answer is yes.
- [39:02]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Which one's first?
- [39:05]
Sundar Pichai
I can't tell you today, but you know, but I do think, you know.
- [39:11]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Here'S a different one. Which one would you want to run?
- [39:14]
Sundar Pichai
Look, I personally.
- [39:16]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Yeah, you're staying with the mother chef, you know. Yes.
- [39:19]
Sundar Pichai
You know, look, I deeply care about building, seeing the journey through on AI. It's what in 2015 I set the company to be AI first. It's why I was excited to be a CEO. And I think the next decade is going to be the most interesting there.
- [39:35]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
You said you want to see it through. What does through look like? What's the other side of through and how long is that?
- [39:42]
Sundar Pichai
I probably think about this differently than most of the people. I think there's a lot of focus on AGI. What does the word mean? Ironically, 10 years ago at Google you would have these debates I remember, including with Larry Sergey, like when will the Turing test be solved? This was 2010 or so. There would be puts and takes on whether it's less than five years, five to 10 years and so on. Look, we crossed the Turing test barrier. No one speaks about it now to my earlier example on Waymo, the fact that Waymo 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 get in the car on way more and they don't think about that. So I think asking these questions is the more important question. Is the technology progressing rapidly? Yes. Will 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?
- [40:43]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
In the next decade. Then what does Google look like? What is Google in 10 years from now, given all the competition we're talking about, all these other names that are trying to do what you're doing and everything else. Will it have 90% market share in search? Will it have $307 billion of revenue? I'm assuming you want more for the.
- [40:59]
Sundar Pichai
Last decade, set the company to be deeply AI first. This is for us. AI is not the LLM is one moment in time. We are working on so many things in such a deep, fundamental way. Pretty much it's the same piece of technology which improves search, which improves YouTube, which improves cloud. Cloud and YouTube are over $100 billion in revenue. Ten years ago, these were in businesses for us. Right? It's what propuls Waymo. We have many, many other bets too. So I still think of us as an AI first company. And I think if you're 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.
- [41:40]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
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.
- [41:49]
Sundar Pichai
Thank you.
- [42:02]
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Dealbook Summit is a production of the New York Times. This episode was produced by Evan Roberts and edited by Sarah Kessler. Mixing by Kelly Piclo, original music by Daniel Powell. The rest of the Dealbook events team includes Julie Zahn, Hilary Kuhn, Angela Austin, Haley Hess, Dana Perkowski, Matt Kaiser and Yen Wei Liu. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Nina Lassom, Ravi Mattu, Beth Weinstein, Kate Carrington and Melissa Tripoli. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next time.