← Decoder with Nilay Patel
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How Sundar Pichai is rethinking Google for the AI era
00:51:16
The Google CEO discusses AI, the future of search, and what’s happening to the web.
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for you starting at only 49 cents per square foot. So all you have to do is pick your perfect floor. Start your carpet project today at the Home Depot. How doers get more done Exclusions apply For licenses see homedepot.com licensenumbers. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in a conversation we recorded just after the Google I O developer conference. This is the fifth year Sundar and I have sat down after I O, and it's become one of my favorite decoder traditions. There's always a lot of news at I O, and this year was no exception. Google has powerful new Gemini models. It's putting AI agents in everything, and it's making huge changes to search on both the web and YouTube that will once again reshape the information ecosystem. That's a lot to talk about, and Sundar and I got into all of it. But I also realized that it's been a long time since I'd asked Sundar the Decoder questions about structure and decision making, so I started there. You'll hear Sundar say he realized he needed to rethink how Google worked a few years ago in response to ChatGPT, and he made a lot of executive changes and big decisions to get the company in a more aggressive posture. Of course, we also talked about all of those search changes and how it seems obvious that the future of Google search is bringing things like the new intelligent search box together with Google's new Gemini Spark agent platform so that searches can set off tasks, not just deliver results. That's exciting, but it seems likely to yet again change the dynamics of the open Web. If you're a decoder listener, you know that I coined the term Google zero a few years ago. That's the idea that Google traffic to websites would fall to zero as the company answered more and more queries directly on the search results page. That's gone from an idea that Sundar batted away in previous interviews to something that the entire media industry is grappling with. The CEOs of major publishers like Conde Nast are now publicly saying they're planning for a world of zero search traffic from now on. Google is also training its models on YouTube videos and changing YouTube search to summarize and index videos so they get dropped directly into the relevant parts. That's sure to cause some creator angst. So I asked Sundar if he's ready to fight the same battles with YouTubers as he currently is with publishers. Finally, I had to ask Sundar about Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis ending the IO keynote by saying that we are at the foothills of the Singularity. It's no surprise that Sundar agrees with Demis, but his thoughts on the timeline to AGI are worth paying attention to. Like I said, this is one of my favorite episodes to do every year because Sundar is always game to actually take the questions and even look at search results on my phone with me. I think you're really going to like this year's conversation. Okay, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, Here we. Sunerbachai, the CEO of Alphabet and at Google. Welcome back to Decoder.
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A
Well, it's great to be here. Nice to see you again, Nilak.
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B
Yeah, this is one of my favorite yearly conversations. I think we've done it at ionav almost five times.
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A
Wow. I quite didn't realize it's been five times, but I enjoy it. Thanks again.
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B
Yeah, I want to start with a little bit of a lightning round. I was thinking about this. We've talked a lot. We always get deep into the weeds of the web and search and big heady ideas. And I realized I have not asked you the decoder questions in quite some time. And just looking back at our previous conversations and Google itself, you've made quite a lot of changes to Google. I think a number of your direct reports have changed over time. You've obviously restructured DeepMind platforms and devices and Android has been restructured itself. Tell me how Google is structured right now.
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A
Okay, it is Google and Alphabet. Obviously we have Alphabet as well, but broadly I think about it as there are three main businesses in Google. Search, YouTube, Google, Cloud, there are enormous platforms we run, which is Android, Chrome, and the whole area to do with it and powering it all is all these important technology areas, which is AI and our infrastructure work and then you have the functions to go with it. But at a high level, you can think of it as search, YouTube, Google Cloud, and then our big computing platforms, those are the main groups and obviously powered with Google, DeepMind and our infrastructure teams. So that's one simple way to get a mental model around it. And of course we have other bets beyond that. Waymo being the most prominent of them all. But there are many, many other bets like Isomorphic Labs and so on.
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B
Yeah, I want to stay focused on the Google of it. I feel like we could do an entire hour on Alphabet and how that's structured and how that works. Is a public company with many bets. But just to stay focused on Google for one second. The knock on Google historically is this is a company that ships lots and lots of products. You cancel lots of products. There's not tons of focus. There's like thousands of names of different products that are overlapping in kinds of different ways. And where that comes from, at least in my view, is that you do have these big infrastructure bets. You have all these capabilities and the people running the businesses can use those capabilities to spin up products. And there's maybe not a lot of overlap or central planning on like, did we launch two of the same thing? How do you resolve that tension? It does seem like Google has gotten a little more focused, but that is the company's culture. Right. We're going to make a lot of bets and see which ones work. How does that resolve for you?
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A
Look, I think there's a lot of intent in what we do too. I think it's not an accident. We have 13 products with a billion users each, and we've been as committed to those products. Longer term, you can go back and think about when Gmail launched or Maps launched or Google Docs launched or Search launched or Chrome launched. And like, you know, so I mean, we've been deep and consistent in many, many areas over a long period of time as well. I do think one way I've internalized in the AI moment is for the first time, we have such a common infrastructure powering all of them with our Gemini models and the underlying AI infrastructure. So we are more able to intently, with intent, do things which cut across things. Right. So personal intelligence is a great example of it. It's one effort. Obviously, users get a choice to turn it on in each of the products, but it's built with one common infrastructure so that it works consistently across your products. The underlying Gemini models itself is an example of it. So we are able to bring that model in the context of the products, like Ask Maps in the context of the Maps product. But a lot of the technology powering it, the voice stack, the model, the intelligence, is all one work. Which is why I think the AI moment offers us a new, really new way to think about it. And not just across Google, across Alphabet too, over time. I think that's what makes this moment so uniquely powerful, is that you can invest so much in R and D and infrastructure and develop a technology which then you can apply across all these areas, obviously in a context in which they are useful for users. But the underlying technology platform is common, so there's a lot of intent that way and so on. You have to give room for innovation, otherwise, so allowing room for innovation where teams on the margin are able to ship some new features, sometimes you later work to harmonize them. Take notebook. NotebookLM Notebooks are now showing up in Gemini and it's effectively projects as notebooks. And you can create a notebook in Gemini, you can go to NotebookLM, you will see the same notebooks, vice versa. So that's an example of where you innovate at first and then you're harmonizing later.
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B
I was watching the keynote yesterday and I saw a lot of intent and confidence from Google. We have this core technology. We can express it in lots of ways. It's still essentially googly. Like there's lots of products, lots of Gemini words. I'm going to figure them all out, I promise. I would contrast to 3, 4 years ago when there was the ChatGPT moment. Everyone worried about what Google would do. Could OpenAI show up and take your market share and search away. Between that and now, you have changed Google, right? You have restructured it. There are new people in leadership roles. Connect those dots for me. How did you think about, okay, I need to actually change how the company works with the competitive moment you were in that got you here?
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A
That's a great question. Look, I think for me, I always internalized that moment. It was tough to convey it outside, but we had set the company. I had pivoted the company to be AI first. We had all the ingredients. So in some ways I felt like the Overton window had changed. People were adopting these technologies faster than we had expected. And so to me it was a way to go and actually express ourself through our products. But I realized we had to Organize ourselves for it. And going back to my earlier point, I realized we need a core models and a core infrastructure team to power everything we are doing across Google. So a lot of my initial energy was to go set that up. One AI team. We had world class research teams in Brain and DeepMind bringing that together as Google DeepMind, which was harder than it sounds because it's like saying go put Stanford and MIT together and create a department out of it or a university out of it. So I think doing that well. And then at that time I also set up with Amin Badat who's our SVP of AI infrastructure now, a centralized infrastructure team which has paid great dividends. And then another evolution was realizing we need a chief AI architect to kind of architect this technology across Google and CORAI taking on that role as well. So those were important changes. We obviously made sure search needed to move faster. So search was split across many leaders. So pulling it under Elizabeth Reed with Nick Fox being responsible for the overall area. Josh Woodward coming to help with help with our labs product and working on Gemini later, driving innovation as well as obviously extraordinary leaders in the company, other leaders like Philip Schindler who runs all our operations and so on. So it is stepping back and end to end thinking about the structure and make sure we are set up well for this moment where we need to move faster as a company, which meant we needed to make faster decisions. I set up these new product reviews once a week. They were AI product reviews, making sure we are intentful about how we apply this technology, where we apply them and wanted to review everything firsthand. That anything to do with AI which we were shipping to users went through that channel and I spent time directly with whoever was working on it.
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Yeah, the other decoder question I ask everybody is about decisions. You're describing a lot of big decisions, some of them uncomfortable as you change people around. How do you make decisions? What's your framework?
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A big part of my framework is over time understanding that there are very, very few decisions which are really consequential and most decisions aren't. So what matters much more is that you make the decision because that's what determines the velocity of an organization. And so the more you're able to make those decisions and keep the company moving forward, you're generally better off. Of course there are a few decisions like combining and setting up Google DeepMind, those are more consequential and you want to take your time deliberating and doing it. But a lot of decision making is about just making them the more you're able to do that, you do develop over time some pattern matching and some intuition for you've seen a version of the problem before and so I think it's good to rely on that and separate the signal from the noise so that the signal is that this is a really important decision and you want to really deliberate around it versus this is just it may look big, but it is more a normal course of action you need to take.
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B
I'm looking around the industry. Your peers in big tech have some of the wildest org chart ideas I've ever heard in my entire life. I think Meta wants to have 50 engineers report to a single manager with the power of agents. Jack Dorsey at Block wants all 6,000 people to report to him. Are you having similar thoughts that you should invent some of the craziest org charts with AI ever?
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Look, I think leaders and people are incredibly important and I think our company depends on what the company. Some companies are have a much more narrower suite of products and so different structure may work. When you're running something at the scale of take the scale of Google Cloud, I think it's important that there is a CEO in charge and we are serving all the top enterprises in the world at a scale. So how do you set up for that? So I think great leaders end up mattering a lot like we have Thomas there. So I do think, I think about it, but what I do think about it is how are we using AI more effectively? And we've seen the transition internally, particularly amongst our developers where we have transitioned from using AI tools to assist coding to them a portion of the engineers working, directing teams of agents effectively more and more. And so I think those are transitions underway and I think that will flow beyond just engineering into the rest of the organization. It's already happening. Like even the work we are doing in Gemini Spark is to give that superpower to the hands of consumers, what you can do with these agentic workflows, et cetera. So I'm more focused on making sure we are actually deploying that capability in a native way and that it's working well because for us it's more than just making the company efficient because it's the products we provide to others. Right. So I look at it with a very different lens. How we do it internally is what we are giving to users outside. We use Anti Gravity internally, that's what we are providing outside. So the agents in Anti Gravity is what our developers are using and so that's what we are trying to put outside. So it has that extra dimension to it.
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B
The number one question decoder listeners want me to start asking CEOs, just ask it straightforwardly. How close is AI to replacing you as the CEO?
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It is today still. I just think the CEO job is not that complicated. It is not complicated. There are aspects of it where I think it's going to be very, very helpful in terms of decision making. I joke around that partially joke around, which is like I have to spend a lot of time allocating compute. And I'm like, well, that seems like the AI is going to make more rational choices over time because I deal with a lot of appeals and emotions as part of working through a process like that. So I think look everywhere what I see and which is maybe a bit different to how I think I think done correctly, these tools are going to kind of allow us to operate at the next level in everything we are doing. It's not like you won't do what you were doing before. You will start from a higher foundation. I wasn't there when, like, I don't know, spreadsheets rolled out to companies. Right. And like, it's almost. I have to go think back. How did people do all this financial analysis before? Right. And I'm sure it changed over a period of three to four years fundamentally. And we got used to it. I think agents, et cetera, is a version of it. It's not like you're not going to plan birthday parties. It is just that, you know what you. Let's say you're planning a trip somewhere. Maybe you're actually spending your time thinking about the actual things you want to do with your time versus chasing opening times and how to get tickets and. And so on. So I think it elevates everything to a different, different foundation is how I think about it.
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We have to pause here for a quick break.
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We'll be. Where exactly do U. S. China relations stand?
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The Chinese side came in feeling as if they had figured out how to work both with and against Trump. He was inclined to try to create
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moments of crisis and then if they stood up to him, they were almost uniquely capable of making him back down. I'm Preet Bharara and this week Evan Osnos of the New Yorker joins me to discuss the Trump Xi Summit, which he reported on from Beijing. The episode is out now. Search and follow. Stay tuned with Preet. Wherever you get your podcasts. This week on Net Worth and Chill, we're joined by Danielle Robay, the journalist Forbes called the queen of questions and the host behind Reese Witherspoon's book club podcast and her own show Question Everything. We're exploring a skill that can transform your career, relationships and bank accounts. Knowing how to ask the right questions, Danielle breaks down the art of getting real answers in professional settings, from coffee chats to career pivots, and shares the money conversations we should all be having but aren't. Get ready for hard hitting advice on defining success beyond the dollar signs. Asking better money questions with partners and friends and the mindset shifts that separate people who stay stuck from people who keep growing. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com YourRichBFF.
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B
Welcome back. I'm talking with Google CEO Sundar Pichai about some of the announcements the company just made at Google. I o let me ask you about that and agents. Some of those demos are fascinating. The idea that Search is going to build custom software for everybody, that seems like an idea in software engineering. A first impression. The idea that the computer, you're going to ask it a question and the response will be for it to make you software that helps you get to an answer. I'm fascinated by this idea, but that is fundamentally changing search. And then you kind of look at Gemini Spark, which is your agent platform in the cloud, where you will say go book me some tickets. And Spark might run around and book you some tickets or do some tasks for you. And then there's Anti Gravity, the agentic coding platform. Broadly, every year there's a new paradigm for AI. There was LLMs first and then maybe we're going to chain some LLMs together. Then there's reasoning and then now we're at agents. Is this the foundation or is there another paradigm shift to come?
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I think it's a great question. We are laying most of the building blocks in place. I think. I think fundamentally being able to reason used tools and code are a lot of like having intelligence and reasoning, being able to plan, being able to look up things, use tools and if you need as part of that to build something. So you are kind of laying all the primitives and obviously Anti Gravity is for developers, but the Anti Gravity engine, the harness, is built into a Gemini now, right? Spark is just a mode of Gemini over time it's a feature, we are positioning it. But it's just a tab within Gemini. And so you're bringing that agentic harness users don't need to think about. Developers will understand it over time. In Spark they can code powerful things. But as users you may be building something, creating something, planning a trip and all that is working behind the scenes. So I do think we are laying a lot of the primitives of what we need agents to work end to end or more importantly AI to work. This long running vision of assistant we have all had and worked through myriad forms of it and failing to fully do it well, I think we are closer than ever before to deliver on that promise. We haven't delivered it yet, but that's the journey which I think is closer than ever before.
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B
I look at all the products and they do seem like they should converge. You have the new intelligent search box and I definitely want to talk about search in more detail. But you look at that search box and then you look at whether it's canvas that makes you the apps. You're planning a wedding and it'll just make you an app to help you plan a trip or a wedding or something. And then you have spark where it can go off and do things. And, and I looked at that and I was talking to people yesterday and it just seems obvious that that should be one product.
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A
It will the agents, just like I gave the earlier notebook example of like you're creating notebooks, what are notebooks? You're effectively putting all the context you want in one place and then working off it. It's folders as they've always existed for people. And notebooks should be a consistent primitive across the board. Google products you use, I just view agents that way. It shouldn't matter. And so I do think when you're at the earliest stage of innovation, you create the capability. I think teams are experimenting with it. But for a user over time, if you fire off planning a trip, it should work across both places is how I would think about it.
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B
You're right in that there's something very important about Google search. It is a source of truth for people for however many years, decades now. Go Google it and you'll get an answer. And that answer is the same for you and me generally has been a very important idea. Like it's, I think a fixture in the culture. Maybe Google is the last company saying it will just tell you the truth out of all the companies out there, okay, we're going to infinitely personalize the search box, we're going to infinitely personalize the search experience and we're all going to get different answers to queries. We're all going to maybe even look at different interfaces depending on what we're asking, what our personal context is, how much data Google has. Do you think about that profoundly? Like how, how much can you Destabilize the last sort of common source of truth most people experience on the Internet.
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A
Look, I think there are factors well beyond our control, which is people today have a wider variety of sources than ever before. So I think, you know, people are getting content from so many different sources. But within the world of Google, I still think we deeply care about this being a source of knowledge and information. I think there are objective experiences and subjective experiences. What's the capital of the usa? It's not going to be custom created for anyone. These are objective things. Help me plan a nice trip to Montreal for a weekend. Naturally, the answers don't need to be the same for everyone. There is a continuum there. I do think the more so we deeply care about for certain categories of information, we do still anchor around authoritative information to present as much of a objective view as possible. If it is health related queries, we naturally tend to show more authoritative answers than if you're saying, what sweater should I go buy?
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B
Can I show you a search result? A few years ago I showed you a search result. I've been tracking this one for years.
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I always love amongst the 10 trillion queries.
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B
Yes, well, this one's a favorite.
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We have a very scientific, statistical way of doing this.
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B
I think this is important and I want to get into how consumers might be experiencing these products. So this is a search I just do all the time for Best Chromebook. I'll just show it to you. There it is. So it starts with an AI overview. It just very confidently tells you the answer. And then there's a bunch of sponsored boxes. And then the one that gets me is right below that. I believe the result is Reddit and it has a top result in Reddit and it's actually a different answer than the AI overview. And then there's the Times which has a different answer. And you kind of scroll this and you're like, the AI overview is telling me one thing. The first organic result is like fairly down the page and all of these are different answers. And I hear what you're saying about objective results and subjective results. What laptop should I buy is somewhere in the middle of those things, right? And I'm just curious how you think that experience for consumers is today in AI mode and where you think it should go.
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A
Look, I think to be very clear, in the world of AI, always an AI mode, we are organizing, giving context, but there are sources throughout. So you still presenting organic content in a different way.
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B
Right?
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A
So I mean there are links and sources you're giving to, but there is an opinion to go with it too, which is what you're talking about. I do think some of this will be iterative with users. Right. I think one of the great things we find with search is it's easy to measure user satisfaction. Over 25 years we've learned to measure user happiness, user satisfaction in a correlated way with improving the quality of the product, not for short term. So that's why we do these long term studies and if we get wrong, get any experience wrong, it shows in the metrics and we course correct and we pride on the ability to track this over longer term, be it engagement sessions. Returning to a topic, the number of bounce backs they do so very, very sophisticated way of looking at it. I think in some areas like that I think the experience will continue to evolve. You're right.
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B
Do you think that experience is good today?
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A
I think it's probably more opinionated than it should be. For that particular query you showed me, that's how that was my reaction as a user. So I think that's a scope for improvement is how I would say in a fast evolving space. And you know, but, but I would expect that to happen in the product. Right. Like my intuition there is. Oh, that's way more opinionated. There is some chance that's personal personalized to. You may be testing it in a way that you're uniquely personalizing. You are. The reason that query might not be exactly representative though I think, I think because I know how you review all these things like you know, so there is some chance you're in the 0.0001%.
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B
So this is kind of why I'm asking about infinitely personalizable results. Right. And I asking if the experience is good because I would bet that most people experience AI in Google search like all the time they have that experience or they kick to AI mode and there's the stuff you can measure about user satisfaction and then there's how the public feels about AI. And I think there's a pretty yawning gap in hey, there's these user numbers going up and we're close to a billion users and the free products people are experiencing how good they might be. And and then just the polling data. Young people dislike AI as objective as that gets. You can go ask them and they will tell you in measurable ways they dislike it. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, was booed at a college graduation speech he was giving. 7 in 10Americans oppose data center construction. There's some gap between the product experiences people are having and how they feel about the technology. Do you think you can close that gap? Do you think these products are good enough?
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A
I think it is a very profound topic and I feel like you're linking the two things. I think people rightfully so, AI is the most profound technology humanity is going to deal with. It's happening at a very fast pace. I don't think humans are evolved for processing this much change. And the rate of change, particularly over the last few years, is incredibly high. And people rightfully so, particularly with all what they're hearing, I think people are trying to understand the future and in their personal context of their lives, including what it means at an economic level and so on. And so to me it really makes sense why there is anxiety around this technology. And I think we should be very attuned. And I think that's an important topic and I think that's much broader and bigger than the facets of what's happening. You know, people don't directly associate these two all the time. In some cases, yes, they're linked in certain ways.
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B
I think people experience the free versions of these models in various products. I think they open their social media feeds and they see slop. I think they see headlines about all that stuff. I think they have the tools just sort of presented to them. The Gemini sparkle shows up in all the Google products whether you ask for it or not. And then I do think you link it to, oh, they're asking for a lot of electricity and maybe my rates will go up and maybe all the jobs will go away. And that's pretty scary. And I, I don't know if the value exchange is there.
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A
I think these are good things to study. I think you're being too specific on what's happening versus I'm just broadening it out and saying that might be part of the explanation. I do think there are other, deeper factors too.
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B
Do you think it's just a marketing problem? I've heard your peers say that AI just has a marketing problem.
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A
No, I don't think so. That's the point I'm making. I'm in fact arguing against it. I think it makes sense to me why people would feel consens about it. It feels natural to me. People are standing and telling about how AI could make a lot of jobs go away and why wouldn't you feel a sense of anxiety about it? And I think those are deeper, deeper issues which we have to tackle as a society. That doesn't mean, yes, there's concern about AI slop at a product level. All that are true. All I'm pointing out is it's a multi layered problem. But I don't think all the source of the data center angst is directly related to one specific experience you're having in a product or something alone like that. That's all the point I'm making. It is broader and bigger than that. I do think there's a lot of AI slop out there. I feel it. And so in an early phase of technology, with the competitive dynamic that exists, I think a lot of things are getting rolled out. But we also see empirically how people are using these products in very deep ways. And I think not all of it is if you go in a place where Waymo hasn't come and you just poll people talk about self driving cars, what you get in the polls is different from how they feel and they use these cars. So technology also goes through these things. People have pretty negative views of the Internet too by the way. If you go poll right, if you ask about the Internet. But it's a fabric of our lives and we have to adapt to it. So all of that is simultaneously happening. I think it's a complex topic. To me it feels like people are worried about rising energy prices and if so, they want to make sure these AI is not exacerbating the problem. Right. And that's a valid concern. And I think and it's up to us as an industry to make sure if you're building data centers, what can we do to make sure we aren't contributing to that problem? So I think that I view as our responsibility, not just us and the government. I think there's bipartisan concerns around some of the stuff. So for example, there's a rate player ratepayer pledge we all signed up to with a set of commitments. Maybe there needs to be more done. I think all of that goes hand in hand. I think it's important to talk about topics like skilling workforce adaptations. I think we are driving a lot of change very fast through society. I think those end up being very important topics as well. So I think there's concerns at all those levels and I expect this concerns to be meaningful as we go forward. I think it is. Many years ago I said this is more profound than fire or electricity. So you have always felt that or think about deep fakes and how do you know whether something is. These models are getting better at simulating reality. This is why we working so hard buildsynth id. We are open sourcing it. We are pulling many, many partners together. And it's great for me to see the industry collaborate on a topic like this. Cybersecurity is another good example. I think these are all real concerns. I do think as an industry we need to do more. Governments will have a stronger role to play. So all of that and the public needs to be involved. You cannot have the most consequential technology rolling out to the world in a way, in democracies without the public citizens rightfully having a voice around it. So to me, it is really important that we go through this phase and that's how we learn how to adapt.
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B
Yeah, I'll leave it. I think my argument is that the products do the marketing work and that's my push. I'm still waiting to see the killer app for consumers that does it. I think we have the killer for enterprise. I want to talk about the web though, before I burn all of that one point.
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A
There are times I've gone through a health journey in Gemini. It feels more than a killer aptomy, better than anything I've ever done before. So, you know, so I think it's, you know, so people are going through those experiences too.
- [35:43]
B
Yeah. We have to take another short break here. We'll be back in just a minute. Welcome back. I'm talking with Google CEO Sundar Pichai about what Google and AI search have done and might continue to do to the open web. I want to talk about the web, you know, the health journey in Gemini that requires a rich data set of health information on the web to exist. Vo requires, I believe you're training Gemini and YouTube videos. Right. Veo requires the YouTube ecosystem to operate and to be fruitful to make new work in. You and I have discussed the concept I call Google Zero for many years, the idea that it will stop sending traffic to the web. You've disagreed with me that this is real?
- [36:34]
A
Very much so. This last week doesn't happen in the last many years.
- [36:38]
B
Well, I'm just going to read you a quote. This time it's not me. And I didn't feed this to him. Roger lynch, the CEO of Conde Nast, he did an interview with TVPN last week and he said, I'm just gonna read a quote. Every year our search traffic was down more than we had forecast. So last year I told our teams, assume there is no search. You have to have your business as planned. As if search is zero, that is Google Zero. Conde Nast is saying we're assuming that search will go to zero. How would you respond to that? Right. The idea, one of the biggest, most iconic publishers in the world is saying, I can't depend on this anymore.
- [37:08]
A
Look, first of all, the information ecosystem is so much broader beyond Google by far. We see it in the data, you see it everywhere. So any publisher over the last 10 years, I would look at Verge and I would say where you were when you first took over, how much it's evolved since then, the types of content you make, where all you put that content out, how all you users are coming to you. I think it's exceptionally dynamic and so it makes sense to me. Every publisher is adapting to this new world. We are adapting to the evolving world, how users are consuming technology we had to do when the world shifted from web to mobile. We are shifting it from a world of mobile to people having ongoing conversations, chatting with these products, talking to them, consuming it in voice, and many different form factors. People are expressing preferences for various types of content. They're looking for user generated content, they're looking for podcasts, they're looking for that. Through it all, we are very committed to both meeting user expectations and also getting them to connecting them to what's out on the web. And just even in the last year, even since we've launched these features, we've gone back, we've added more links. Another area where behavior is changing. Many publishers, rightfully so, are thinking, what subscription models?
- [38:40]
B
Sure. But I'm just saying Conde Nast is saying we're going to assume our search traffic is zero given the trends that we see. Should they assume that?
- [38:47]
A
I mean, this is, you know, I always view people understand their businesses better. Me, I'm not in a position to tell, you know, such an iconic publisher what they should think about their business or plan. You know, if they're building content which is high quality and people like it, I expect us to be, to reflect that in our products. That much I can commit to them. Right. So that's, that's what my, my, you know, so. But I think more than any other company through this evolution, we are working very hard to make sure people can get connected. And we are planning to do it in search in Gemini. And that's still underpins a lot of what we do. But there is evolution like as the technology improves, low quality clicks get filtered out. That's a natural evolution. We see, we see it in our metrics, bounce clicks are going down and so those are all dynamics and people are going to a wider array of information and there are more people producing information than ever before. So that pie is growing faster than, so all these Dynamics are happening. It's a complex ecosystem but our commitment to making sure we reflect the vastness and diversity of the content. And we do think people want to connect ultimately to these sources, but we are trying to meet them in those moments. And people come with very different intent and very different moments. One of the small features we have done but very important I think is if you've subscribed to something, reflect that as a preferred source for you as a user. But that's a new change which we didn't have before. We are adapting to the fact that publishers are increasingly turning to subscribe offerings too.
- [40:44]
B
Publishers, YouTube creators, should they be able to opt out of training to get surfaced in search?
- [40:50]
A
I mean this is a much broader topic. I think both laws and regulations will have to evolve. The courts will have to wane. It's important to protect copyright, it's important to protect fair use. And so these are constructs which will evolve dynamically through that.
- [41:12]
B
But do you want to be in a bunch of lawsuits with YouTube creators? You're in a lawsuit with publishers in the UK the rhetoric in that lawsuit is getting increasingly heated. Google has said that the proposed solution is a quote free writer charter. Every year the News Media association sends me a quote to redo and you know, they say Google calling us free writers is obviously ridiculous and in order it's basic supply chain economics. If the value were really all on Google side they would simply allow publishers to opt out. Do you want to be in that same fight with a bunch of creators on YouTube about opting out?
- [41:44]
A
Look, we are constantly as part of Gemini developing. We did offer a new opt out with Google extended and we are in conversations with publishers. We'll take feedback and over times work through what makes sense. And obviously we are not the only player in a big ecosystem. We are also trying to put out products which are competitive to other products out there. And I think all the publishers will also write an article saying the product is not very, you know, so this is more complicated than it looks.
- [42:22]
B
I just, I think you have spent more time thinking about the web and the health of the web and the necessity of the web. Paint me the picture for what a healthy web looks like. You know, I actually search world.
- [42:33]
A
One of the arguments I've made over time and I actually see it playing around a little bit more. I've started using the web more again over the last year, year and a half. I think all these AI experiences have brought the web back more. You know, there was a time when it felt like, you know, But I always felt the web would be vibrant. In fact, I've argued the web is going to be vibrant every year. And you know, I would still argue it today. You know, the web is constantly evolving. I've never seen anything as dynamic as the web, which is why it's been such a privilege to be part of that evolution. I look at agents, that is the next evolution of the web, which we will deal with. And I think it will evolve the web pretty profoundly. There will be a lot of debates about what's okay, what's not, but I think the web will continue to be. People want to put out information, connect with other people, people want to be connected. People aren't trying to be in a siloed world, detached that doesn't reflect the reality of the human experience. I think the web is going to play as central a role on it as ever before. In fact, the Universal Commerce Protocol, if anything, what we announced yesterday, I think people slightly are underestimating the impact of it.
- [43:50]
B
Can I juxtapose that? There are a lot of muscular announcements about new products, new features and agentic tools you can use and UCP and Amazon and Walmart and everywhere we're going to use a new standard we're building for shopping and all that is very tangible. And then IO ended with Denis Asavis, the CEO of DeepMind coming out and he said this thing that I have not been able to stop thinking about. He said Google's cutting edge research and products will help unlock AGI's incredible potential for the benefit of the entire world. When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the Singularity. Can you tell me what it means to be in the foothills of the Singularity?
- [44:28]
A
Demis and I have had long, deep conversations on this topic. I think in this context, I think forum, the advent of AGI is what he thinks of as the Singularity.
- [44:37]
B
And you know, do you have a definition of AGI? Have you debated, do you have an agreement?
- [44:41]
A
We debate it a lot. I think both Demis and I are very close to how we think about and you know, think about. We think about AGI in the, you know, in there is a harder definition of AGI, which is that it has to be more comprehensively do the wide range of tasks, including cognitive tasks in a way that's comparable. So I think we'll at some point actually put it out as a company, I think, and we are working on that. But I think that's what he's talking about. In this context, by the way, I think it's important for us to understand that this technology is progressing very rapidly. And later today I'll be going and spending time with our AI researchers and not just in our company, but amongst the frontier labs. I think there's wide consensus that this technology AGI is. People may quibble around is it three years? But the technology's sooner rather than later. And so I think it's more important to communicate that because that's what to an earlier part of the conversation. It's important that we as a society understand it and are preparing as much as possible.
- [45:57]
B
I asked you this question that maybe the first time we ever talked about AI, I asked you if language was intelligence. And the progression here is we're layering more and more on LLMs, we're doing longer chains of reasoning, we're building harnesses, we're doing all this stuff. But the core technology is still transformers. It's still the thing Google invented all the so long ago. Can LLMs get you to AGI? Is that path clear?
- [46:19]
A
You know, the trajectory over the last three years has been incredible. And looking ahead, you know, it looks the LLMs of today are, you know, have evolved in many ways too. So we are constantly evolving it. And to me it's like asking like, can computers get us to like the way, you know, the von Neumann architecture is still what powers most computers today. But he won't recognize the modern one of our TPU parts, right? Or maybe he would. There's still a lot of commonality to it. So I think the underlying technology keeps evolving so profoundly. I look at every year we have had major breakthroughs. You just saw his demo in anti gravity and ability to prompt and create an operating system.
- [47:08]
B
Right.
- [47:08]
A
And like, you know, it's very dangerous
- [47:09]
B
for Google to be able to make new operating systems.
- [47:12]
A
We'll have to, we'll have to make sure we don't talk to Max on creating. I'll give you that it's fair, but, but you know, that is the power of what these things are doing, right? There are the top mathematicians in the world, top physicists in this world who are interacting with these tools and using them in important ways. But we still, you know, can these tools go fundamentally make novel scientific discoveries on their own? Not yet. It's both remarkable how much it's progressed. I do think it has important evolutions to happen and then there are strong opinions out there in the world about how much of a real understanding of the world you need to take that next leap I'm pretty optimistic that we will continue to make a lot of progress.
- [48:07]
B
Yeah. All right, so last question. What is your timeline? Is it three years, five years? AGI, where are you at?
- [48:13]
A
You know, I have always answered it this way. I think that timeline doesn't matter because the rate of progress means you're dealing with ever more intelligent systems in a profound way. So the way I would answer that question three years from now, whether you and I call it AGI or not doesn't matter because it'll be very, very powerful and we have to prepare for it.
- [48:37]
B
Yeah. Sunar, this is great. Thank you so much for the entire Again, thanks, Nilak.
- [48:41]
A
Pleasure.
- [48:44]
B
I'd like to thank Sundar Pichai for taking time to join me on Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us@decoder the verge.com we really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads or bluesky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at Decoder Pod. It's the same handle on TikTok and Instagram. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. If you really like the show, hit us with that five star review. The show is produced by Kate Cox nikstat this episode was additionally produced by Victoria Barrios and shot by Owen Grove and Brett Putnam. It was edited by Kabir Chopra. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder Music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.