A (8:16)
Every decade or so you have this inflection points. You have a new technology. Was the personal computer at one point, the Internet coming in the late 90s. Then it was mobile. Then it's been cloud, what we call this cloud now. It's clearly the era of AI. And can you give us a sense of the scale? Maybe four years ago, Google was spending less than $30 billion per year. This year that number is going to be over $90 billion. And if you collectively add what all the companies are doing, we have well over a trillion dollars of Investment going in, building the infrastructure for this moment. And one way I think about it is in the next couple of years we'll end up building what we probably built in the past 10 to 20 years. Now you mentioned some of those phases of technological advancement that happened with much market excitement as well as. And the obvious question it's around the whole of this country and the whole world right now is is it a bubble? Given the potential of this technology, the excitement is very rational. It's also true when we go through these investment cycles, there are moments we overshoot. We can look back at the Internet right now, There was clearly a lot of excess investment. But none of us would question whether the Internet was profound or did it drive a lot of impact. It's fundamentally changed how we work digitally as a society. I expect AI to be the same. So I think it's both rational and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this. No company is going to be immune, including us, if you over invest, we'll have to work through that phase. But the whole point of the value and productivity kind of offer to companies that are buying oil goods and your services is to automate many human tasks, is it not? Let me put it this way. I think people today are juggling many things and people are overloaded. We've always had back in the history, you know, it could be a dishwasher coming to your home. I remember growing up, you know, when we got our first refrigerator in the home, how much it radically changed my mom's life. You know, it freed her up to do other things, right? So let's take the example of a radiologist. The number of scans people are getting is growing year on year and the number of images per scan is also rising pretty significantly. How do you help a radiologist cope up with this increased demand? Maybe an AI tool can help that way. So I think that's what you will see, more or less. All of the hopes, the hype, the valuations, the social benefit of this transformation you've just described built on a central assumption that the technology functions, that it works. Let me propose one simple test of Gemini. Is it accurate? Always. Does it tell the truth? Look, we are working hard from a scientific standpoint to ground it in real world information, right? And there are areas. Part of what we have done with Gemini is we have brought the power of Google Search. So it uses Google search as a tool to give answers more accurately. But there are moments these AI models fundamentally have a technology by which they predicting what's next and they are prone to errors. Yeah, you know some of the examples. There is an example of glue as a pizza ingredient. Sitting senator wrongly accused of assault. This is bad, isn't it? Today I think we take pride in the amount of work we put in to give as accurate information as possible. But the current state of the art AI technology is prone to some errors. This is why people also use Google search and we have other products which are more grounded in providing accurate information. So you have to learn to use these tools for what they are good at and not blindly trust everything they say. The information ecosystem has to be much richer than just having AI technology being the sole product in it. The scale of the AI build out you've just described so vividly is creating another trade off, not just for you, but for humanity. On energy, I think this is an opportunity. To be frank, Mr. Pichai, with the world, is there a new calculus now? Is the build out of AI more important than climate over time? I don't think this doesn't need to be a trade off or a zero sum game. So you're right. AI is dramatically increasing demand for energy in a way that the current systems can't fully cope up. But that is driving extraordinary investments in solar, in battery technology, in nuclear technology and other sources. So I think I am, as a technologist, am optimistic that we will have abundant sources of renewable energy in the future.