Our Field Trip to Google I/O + A Sit-Down With Sundar Pichai + System Update

Summary

Hard Fork: "Our Field Trip to Google I/O + A Sit-Down With Sundar Pichai + System Update"

The New York Times • Aired May 22, 2026
Hosts: Kevin Roose & Casey Newton
Special Guest: Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google

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Episode Overview

This rich episode of Hard Fork brings listeners right into the heart of Google I/O 2026, with hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton breaking down the biggest news, hands-on impressions, and announcements from the annual developer conference. The episode features a candid interview with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, digging deep into the state of AI competitions, new products, the future of search, societal perceptions of AI, and ongoing safety and regulatory developments. The show closes with the trademark "System Update" segment, covering major news stories from the tech world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Immediate Impressions from Google I/O 2026

[01:43 - 07:41]

• Atmosphere and Announcements:

  • Casey calls Google I/O "the Coachella of capitalism. The warped tour of the web, a Lollapalooza of links" [01:49 – Roose].
  • Major themes: Advancements in Agentic Search, video editing AI, Demis Hassabis’ declaration that we’re "in the foothills of the Singularity" [02:21 – Pichai].
  • Google claims the “biggest change to Search in 25 years,” though Casey is cautious: “When we saw it in the demos, it just looked like the box grows if you type more into it” [02:43 – Newton].

• Agentic Technology Focus:

  • Discussion on Google's new AI agents, productivity tools, and “Agentic Search Mode,” billed as an upgrade to Google Alerts [03:22 – Roose].
  • Google's bet is on "cost and speed" via new model Gemini 3.5 Flash ("four times faster and much cheaper") [03:36 – Roose]:
    • “They don’t seem to care about having the absolute most cutting edge models as long as they can serve them cheaply and quickly to billions of people.” [03:54 – Roose]

• Skepticism and Product Market Fit:

  • Casey wonders which AI agents will find “true product market fit” and admits he doesn’t know what he’d use something like Gemini “OpenClaw” for: “I’m not dying to have Gemini OpenClaw working overnight on my behalf because I don’t know what I would ask it to do.” [04:49 – Newton]

• Vibe at the Conference:

  • Despite a global “AI backlash,” there’s excitement at I/O—“there was nary a boo to be heard” during AI segments [06:56 – Newton].
  • Roose notes: “Not a lot of mention of the AI backlash or any of the things, I think they're just sort of hoping that these new products are so useful to people that they'll sort of forget about all their objections.” [07:22 – Roose]

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2. Hands-On Impressions: Gemini 3.5 Flash

[07:54 – 12:00]

• Practical Use:

  • Roose tested Gemini 3.5 with the Anti Gravity coding assistant—"very fast," but “doesn't seem like that much of an improvement” over what's out there now [08:20].
  • Noted that Gemini 3.5 Flash is “significantly more expensive” than prior versions, which may undercut marketing around being cheap [09:05].

• Audience Reaction:

  • Casey: “This class of models has always just felt like it’s not for me. ...I am somebody who is always willing to wait a little bit longer and to spend a little bit more to get the best answer.” [09:40 – Newton]

• Model Hype and Realities:

  • Anticipation that Gemini 3.5 Pro (coming next month) will be the bigger advance.
  • General verdict: solid base hit, not a home run; more impressive than the “scrambling” days but still not obviously ahead of the pack [11:34 – 12:00].

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3. Interview with Sundar Pichai

[14:48 – 42:49]

State of the AI Competition

• Pichai candid about Google’s position:
  • “Our models are at the frontier in some areas and there are areas where we are behind the frontier.” [15:13 – Pichai]
  • On coding: “We are a bit behind at this moment, but we are hard at work... The moment is intense enough that if you're slightly off three months ago, people are like we are ahead and no one could catch up with us. And then now the conversation flips." [15:45 – Pichai]

Product Reception, Challenges & Strategy

• Acknowledges mixed reception and areas to improve:

  • “There are some artifacts and behaviors we are seeing which I think are easy to address... We had tightened usage limits to avoid outages” [19:00 – Pichai]

• On focus vs. “spray and pray”:

  • “We are a large company and we have scale so we will be able to focus on a few multiple things at the same time.” [20:33 – Pichai]

The Future of Search

• Roose probes: Will Google rip off the “10 blue links” Band-Aid?

  • Pichai: “It is very clear as we evolve through these changes, people are responding positively... people want search to be fast… sources and links will always be there.” [21:52 – Pichai]

• Addressing Casey's transition to AI-first search:

  • Pichai: “Between a combination of subscription and ads, the right models will continue to be there. Adam Smith’s rules don’t change in this new world.” [23:13 – Pichai]

Public Perception and Backlash

• Reacting to poor poll numbers for AI:
  • “AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on... I understand [the anxiety]. ...We've had far simpler technology shifts where there has been anxiety... This is of a scale unlike anything we've seen before.” [24:14 – Pichai]
  • Emphasizes the importance of public dialogue: “Citizens should be engaged... there’s something healthy about this dialogue, too.” [25:52 – Pichai]

Generational & Economic Shifts

• On workforce anxieties:
  • “Spreadsheets changed that... so many more people are going to be able to code in the world. ...People are going to be more productive, they will have more time for leisure.” [28:24 – Pichai]
  • “I do think there are many positive dimensions to it which are maybe not being talked about.” [30:29 – Pichai]

Agents for the Everyday User

• Pichai’s example use case:
  • “I just asked it to just look ahead at my meetings and color code it in categories so that I can keep sense of how I'm spending my time… It came back with suggestions... it’s actually like sci-fi” [32:16 — Pichai].

Safety, Governance, and Regulation

• On government oversight:

  • “We'll have to wait for the details... They've engaged with the industry in a very robust way... But it's important as a country to be at the frontier too, not doing it in a way where you're overly slowing things down.” [34:11 – Pichai]

• On Recursive Self-Improvement:

  • “These models are getting better at coding... you can see in Anti Gravity Today, in over 12 hours it can build a simple OS from scratch... But in the way people describe RSI [recursive self-improvement], I don’t think we are there yet.” [35:55 – Pichai]
  • If RSI triggers? “It shouldn’t be an internal conversation at that point. It has to be a much broader conversation... we have to avoid race conditions at those stages of AGI.” [37:06 – Pichai]

AI Compute Race

• On selling TPUs to rivals: “If we have found an exploit which could impact a governmental agency, the government needs to be prepared for it... It allows us to stay at the frontier. Economies of scale helps in various ways.” [37:55 – Pichai]

Philosophical Look Forward

• Relationship with AGI & Singularity:
  • “There is inevitable progress toward AGI... All I meant [before] was–even in this scenario, AGI is going to take 10 years... I don’t want people to think because AGI is 10 years out, you don’t need to act or prepare.” [40:01 – Pichai]
  • On timeline: “The rate of progress over the last one to two years has made me feel it’s on the closer side than not.” [40:40 – Pichai]
  • On “foothills of the Singularity” (Demis Hassabis): “If you believe that it makes sense... that’s what you’re articulating. ...I think it’s important to articulate that because we are all at the frontier building this technology.” [41:49 – Pichai]

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4. System Update: Major Tech Headlines

[44:55 – 56:17]

a) Elon Musk vs. OpenAI Lawsuit

• Trial quickly dismissed due to the statute of limitations—“You're too late, bro.” [45:21 – Roose]
• Musk had been “scheming... to turn OpenAI into a for-profit company and even absorb it into Tesla” well before his current disputes [46:38 – Newton].

b) Meta Restructuring

• Meta lays off 8,000 and reassigns 7,000 to AI initiatives.
• Meta "specializes in corporate reorganizations and just happens to also make some popular social media.” [48:13 – Roose]
• Roose: “We should expect, like, a steady drip of stories from Meta over the coming months about how bad morale is.” [49:00 – Roose]
• Newton: “If you work at Meta, your job is to help Mark Zuckerberg win the race to build AGI before anyone else. Entire point of the company now, like there's not a secondary objective.” [50:25 – Newton]

c) Pope on AI

• Pope Leo XIV to release an encyclical on AI, with Chris Olah (Anthropic co-founder) at the launch. Co-hosts joke: “It’s like, the Pope finishes up with Mass and says, but I do have one more thing. ...This is Vatican I/O!” [50:33 – Newton/Roose]

d) Literary AI Scandals

• AI-generated short story wins major prize; widespread suspicion and use of AI-detection tools ensue.
• In nonfiction, a book on “truth in the age of AI” is found to use fabricated AI-generated quotes, including for Kara Swisher: “If you've ever talked to Kara Swisher, [that quote]... she has been brain swapped, a true pod person situation.” [54:44 – Newton]
• Roose: “Anyone who puts a rule into a workplace, a school, a publishing house that says, hey, no AI use. All you're doing is telling everyone that they have to lie about their AI.” [55:08 – Roose]

e) Announcing Hard Fork Live (San Francisco, June 10)

• Featured guests will include Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Dylan Field (Figma), Cindy Cohn (EFF), and more [56:26].

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the I/O energy:
  “This is like the Coachella of capitalism. The warped tour of the web, a lollapalooza of links.”
  – Kevin Roose [01:49]

• On the pace of AI progress:
  “The moment is intense enough that if you're slightly off three months ago, people are like, ‘We are ahead and no one could catch up with us.’ And then now the conversation flips. But that's part of the territory of being at the frontier.”
  – Sundar Pichai [15:45]

• On the hype vs. reality:
  “Fast and cheap is what you talk about when it isn’t the best. And so that's what we're getting this year.”
  – Casey Newton [04:20]

• On workforce and the future of jobs:
  “I think people are going to be more productive, they will have more time for leisure. ...I don't want in any way to minimize... every technology shift brings disruption with it. ...I do think there are many positive dimensions to it which are maybe not being talked about.”
  – Sundar Pichai [28:24-30:29]

• On regulating the AI frontier:
  “If you're approaching moments like [recursive self-improvement], you would be consulting with—it shouldn't be an internal conversation at that point. I think it has to be a much broader conversation than that. ...We have to avoid race conditions at those stages of AGI.”
  – Sundar Pichai [37:06]

• On Google’s competitive philosophy:
  “They don't seem to care about having the absolute most cutting edge models as long as they can serve them cheaply and quickly to billions of people.”
  – Kevin Roose [03:54]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Google I/O Impressions: 01:43 – 07:41
• Gemini 3.5 Flash Hands-On: 07:54 – 12:00
• Interview with Sundar Pichai: 14:48 – 42:49
  • State of the AI Race: 15:06 – 21:17
  • Product & Search Future: 21:17 – 23:55
  • AI & Society: 23:55 – 31:09
  • Agentic Tech & Safety: 31:09 – 37:32
  • AGI and Singularity: 39:32 – 42:49
• System Update (Tech Headlines): 44:55 – 56:17

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Tone & Style

The episode retains the lively, humorous, and slightly irreverent tone typical of Hard Fork. There is a mix of skeptical interrogation, witty banter, and deep dives into technology and societal implications. Sundar Pichai’s responses are composed, thoughtful, and measured, conveying cautious optimism alongside technical honesty.

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For Those Who Haven’t Listened

This episode offers a comprehensive, nuanced, and sometimes playful insiders’ look at both the genuine technical progress and unresolved questions shaping the AI era. The highlight is an unusually candid interview with Sundar Pichai, rich with technical and philosophical insights, alongside reporting on new tech products and the rapidly shifting business and cultural terrain around AI.

If you want a snapshot of the tech world in 2026—its ambitions, hype, anxieties, and real, unfinished business—you’ll find it all here.

Transcript

[Casey Noon]

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[Kevin Roose]

Casey, I couldn't help but notice that during much of the IO keynote, you were on your phone playing Balatro and doing emails on your laptop.

[Casey Noon]

Well, you know, when you have your agent recording the entire thing and transcribing it for you, you can just sort of glance up every few seconds and see if a news event is happening. It's actually really amazing.

[Kevin Roose]

The future of this is the promise of AGI. Soon we will be able to play Balatro wherever we are.

[Casey Noon]

You can pay attention to nothing and be fine. Welcome to the.

[Kevin Roose]

I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times.

[Casey Noon]

I'm Casey Noon from Platformer and this is Hard Fork. This week it's our annual field trip to Google I O. We have all the big news, plus our conversation with Google CEO Sundar Pichai and then some other highlights from the week with our system update. I know I told that to install last night, but it didn't.

[Kevin Roose]

Did you delay it? Yeah, you're always doing that.

[Casey Noon]

Well, Kevin, the keynote just wrapped up here at iO2026. What did you think?

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. This is like the Coachella of capitalism. The warped tour of the web, a lollapalooza of Lynx. I can keep going. Please don't. And they are doing a lot. We heard about everything from like Agentix Search to these new like, video editing models and products that they have, all the way to Demis Hassabis at the end of the keynote declaring that we are in the foothills of the Singularity.

[Sundar Pichai]

When we look back at this time, I think we all realize that we were standing in the foothills of the Singularity.

[Kevin Roose]

I love that, like Google's version of the Steve Jobs. Like One more thing is like one more thing. The Singularity. A great way to end. So, yeah, what was your standout? What did they announce that caught your eye?

[Casey Noon]

I mean, they have said that they just made the biggest change to search in 25 years. I think time will tell if that is truly as significant a change as they're suggesting because when we saw it in the demos, it just looked like the box grows if you type more into it. But you know, they're also saying that by this summer they're going to be generating custom user interfaces based on your query and a bunch of other stuff I think like a through line through. Everything that they discussed here was coming this summer or coming to a group of trusted testers. And with these kind of like productivity tools, until they're in your hands, you don't really know if anything has changed in your life or not.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, there was a lot of focus on Agentix stuff like Agentic coding. They have this new Agentix search mode which basically is sort of the fancy upgrade to Google Alerts. You can have it sort of tell you when there's like a new home listed on Zillow or a new baseball score you might care about or something like that. I was really interested that they seem to be betting very big on cost and speed. So their new model that they talked about today was Gemini 3.5 Flash, which is the newest version, but it's also, they say, four times faster and much cheaper than the other leading frontier models. And so I think Google's strategy of kind of betting on scale and distribution and like making their models as efficient to serve as possible is really the direction they're going in. Like they don't seem to care about having the absolute most cutting edge models as long as they can serve them cheaply and quickly to billions of people.

[Casey Noon]

I mean, I think they care about it. I think that they just haven't built it yet. You know, fast and cheap is what you talk about when it isn't the best. And so that's what we're getting this year. But you know, I am interested in trying these new agents. I'll say I tried to use the new agent. I said, let me know if Kevin Roose writes a good story, but it hasn't sent me anything. And so I don't know if it's broken or if the AI isn't working or what.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, I'm writing good stories constantly, so something must be going on.

[Casey Noon]

I mean, my real curiosity is like, which of these agents are going to find true product market fit? Like which is the agent that is going to get a billion users? Because we saw them show off what is effectively their version of openclaw, which definitely had a big moment earlier this year. But it's still not clear to me that that is an actual mainstream use case. I have to say, of everything they showed off. I'm not dying to have Gemini open Claw working overnight on my behalf because I don't know what I would ask it to do.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, I think that was actually one of my favorite parts because I am currently running a Claude swarm on my open laptop.

[Casey Noon]

Doing what? What is it doing?

[Kevin Roose]

And what they have said is that you can now do that through Gemini Spark this new agent thing, and it will run in, like, a virtual machine on the cloud so you don't have to, like, keep your laptop cracked like an insane person.

[Casey Noon]

Kevin, please. What are you doing with your claw?

[Kevin Roose]

I can't even tell you.

[Casey Noon]

You can't even tell because you're not doing anything.

[Kevin Roose]

I'm ushering in the singularity.

[Casey Noon]

You're generating recipes.

[Kevin Roose]

I'm building a bioweapon. But I don't want to say that

[Casey Noon]

in this CR they get sensitive about that sort of thing around here.

[Kevin Roose]

So what was the vibe of IO this year?

[Casey Noon]

I mean, I honestly, the only people that I have talked to are, like, reporters and people who work at Google. So, like, I feel like we have not really had a chance yet to talk to developers and see what is on their minds. Clearly they have a lot of new toys to play with, and I'm sure they're excited about that. But, you know, as I said, until you get your hands on them, you don't really know if your life has changed.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, I feel like they have confidence in their sort of place in the front of the pack. I don't think they believe that their models are the best in the world yet. But if they're cheaper and faster and they can do more stuff, they have this new Omni model that can take in video as well as images and text. So I feel like they're sort of doing the spray and pray approach to AI development, which is you just do everything everywhere all at once and hope that something hits and it's worked for them.

[Casey Noon]

Yeah. And I guess I will say one thing about the vibe here at IO this morning, Kevin, which is this is the only recent gathering of a large number of people where mentions of AI did not produce a large chorus of booze. This was a crowd where people actually seemed like they wanted to hear about new AI developments. And as we saw many, many AI generated images and videos over almost two hours, there was nary a boo to be heard.

[Kevin Roose]

I agree. Not a lot of mention of the AI backlash or any of the things, I think they're just sort of hoping that these new products are so useful to people that they'll sort of forget about all their objections. And then, you know, of course, comes Demisis obvious to talk about the singularity. Just to remind you that none of this is normal, that we are experiencing something very weird.

[Casey Noon]

All right, well, I think those are some good early thoughts. We have a lot more to do at IO, starting with probably hitting that lunch line in the press tent.

[Kevin Roose]

I saw some UBE croissants on my way in. I'm still trying to figure out what that means, but I'm going to go try it.

[Casey Noon]

Perfect. All right, Kevin. Well, we are back in the studio the day after I. Oh, and we have a few hours before we head back down to interview Sundar Pichai. But before we do that, you have spent a little bit of time playing around with this new Gemini 3.5 flash model. So what have you been doing with it?

[Kevin Roose]

So I did try to use Anti Gravity, their kind of coding assistant, to put the model through some of my own evaluations. And it seems like two things are true. One is it's very fast. It's very fast, and you don't hit your sort of token limits at all, like, very quickly, which is a nice contrast to some of the other coding models that I've used. And the second thing is that it just doesn't seem like that much of an improvement over what is out there now. I think, you know, there have been some people on my feeds talking about how they are feeling disappointed by the new Gemini model. There's some indications that it's maybe not as good as Gemini 3.1 Pro at some coding evaluations, but it is much faster. And I think the other thing that people are reacting to is the cost. So the cost of Gemini 3.5 flash, while lower than other kind of frontier models, is significantly more expensive than the last version of Gemini Flash. So people are upset about that. But I think in general, my sense is, like, in it's a good model, it's a pretty good model. It's not like, blowing me away, but it is quite fast. And if you are a company that's burning, you know, billions of tokens a day, you might be interested in that. But for the average person, I would say, like, nothing about it has made me want to switch to it as my daily driver yet.

[Casey Noon]

Yeah. I have to say, like, this class of models has always just felt like it's not for me. Right. Like, I am somebody who is always Willing to wait a little bit longer and to spend a little bit more to get the best answer right. Like, I would sort of rather do that than just sort of have like instant answers from a very cheap model.

[Kevin Roose]

You like to surround yourself with kind of awe inspiring intelligence. Right. That's exactly why we're hosting this podcast together.

[Casey Noon]

That's exactly right. And so, I mean, look, I think for a very wide variety of use cases, a model like this is going to be perfectly fine. If you're, you know, the average Gemini user and you're just trying to pass sixth grade for free, I think this model is going to be a lot of help. But you know, the sort of more vocal AI power user crowd, which are the people that you're going to find on social media, sort of putting these models through their paces on day one, does seem to be a little disappointed here. And I do think it's notable that a model that was sold to us yesterday, largely on the strength of its low price, does not actually seem to be as cheap as maybe we were told.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, and I think part of this is just that the cycle of kind of IO and developer conferences is maybe out of step with how these models are actually being built. I've been hearing some whispers from folks at Google that they are working on something that is more powerful, but that it just may not have been ready in time for IO this year. So I think that's one tricky thing about doing these conferences. Once a year is kind of every deadline has to line up at exactly the same time or else you end up looking like you're behind.

[Casey Noon]

Yeah, I mean, I think the real test for Google, I mean, at least the next real test for Google will come next month when it puts out 3.5 Pro, which I think will sort of be at a similar class of the frontier models that we have today. And that's when I'm going to sort of be putting the model through all of its paces and trying to figure out, okay, like, what part of my daily workflows might this kind of thing slot into.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, Kasey, what is Your verdict on IO? Did it meet your expectations?

[Casey Noon]

It felt like a base hit to me. You know, I think that if they ship everything that they showed off and it works basically as advertised, like, I think that there is some good stuff in there. I don't think that there was a single product that made me think, if I can't use this, like today, I will be in extreme physical distress. But yeah, overall I thought, you know, solid set of announcements. What do you think?

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, I think that basically meets my expectations. I talked to one reporter who was walking around at IO and who said it was like mid sort of like, you know, it's like good, it's good. It's a better position than they were in a couple of years ago at IO when they were basically scrambling to get barred out the door and everything looked like it was going sideways. So they found their footing but it is still not clear whether they are producing a model that will truly be state of the art. All right, so that is some more of our thoughts and early hands on impressions of Gemini 3.5 flash. Now let's head down to Google to talk to Sundar. And because I imagine we might want to ask Sundar a question or two about AI, let's make our disclosures. I work at the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity,

[Casey Noon]

and my fiance works philanthropic.

[Kevin Roose]

We should also disclose that we both use Google.

[Casey Noon]

I'm a longtime Google user. I was. I was part of the gmail beta in 2004.

[Kevin Roose]

Wow, you're old.

[Casey Noon]

So old.

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[Kevin Roose]

Sundar Pachay, welcome back to Hard Fork.

[Sundar Pichai]

Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

[Casey Noon]

Thank you.

[Kevin Roose]

So the last time we had you on the show was in 2023. Bard Rip had just come out and I think at the time the perception was that Google was catching up in AI. How are you feeling about your position in the race these days?

[Sundar Pichai]

Well, that brings back memory. So it feels like eons ago. You know, those three years feel like a long time ago now. But I think it's staggering to see how much both the technology is making progress, we've made progress as a company and I think it's a very dynamic moment in the industry. I think our models are at the frontier in some areas and there are areas where we are behind the frontier. And so it's a combination. I think if you look at overall capabilities including text, multimodality, voice or audio reasoning in general overall intelligence, I think we are very capable when it comes to agent encoding with tool use and instruction following long horizon tasks. I think we are a bit behind at this moment, but we are hard at work and the space is so dynamic. All of the leading labs have their own pre training cycles so you have these cadences and they may not exactly match up. I think the moment is intense enough that if you're slightly off three months ago, people are like we are ahead and no one could catch up with us. And then now the conversation flips. But that's part of the territory of being at the frontier. I think we are the only large company which is actually at that frontier. Right. So one way to think about it is there are in this moment there are a couple of startups which have made extraordinary progress and we have been deeply working on this for a long time. I think we took a big step forward with 3.5 flash. It does address some of the areas we have been behind and I think obviously getting it out in the real world and iterating with that data coming back is going to really help us. I think coding was the area where getting access to the data flows was important. I think we maybe quite didn't have the surface like cloud code as an example or what Anthropic maybe had with cursor too. And so getting anti gravity with 2.0. We've been using it internally at Google for a while. I shared the token usage at Google I o I've never seen anything like it internally. Right. We are doubling every week and people are really putting the models to work. And so that is helping us hill climb quite a bit. But the frontier is very dynamic. But I'm very, very optimistic and confident we'll push through there.

[Casey Noon]

It sounds like if there's any place where you feel maybe not quite at the very lead where you actually want to be, it is coding. Is that right? Like, is that where you're sort of putting the pressure?

[Sundar Pichai]

Look, I think coding ends up being very foundational in everything we do. So I think it's an important frontier to be on. There are areas in coding where we have been very good. You know, we've been very, very good at creating single shot web front ends, everything. But in terms of this long running, you know, tasks where serious developers are working on complicated code bases, I think we are making progress. It is just that there is a gap to the frontier where others are. But we are working, we are well aware of it and making progress there.

[Casey Noon]

3.5 flash has been out for a day. I do think it typically takes a few days to really put these models through their paces. We have seen some complaints though about pricing, model quality. Curious what you've made of the reception so far.

[Sundar Pichai]

You know, I'm looking forward to being done with my interviews and so on so that I can spend more time with the teams.

[Casey Noon]

Yeah, wrap it up.

[Sundar Pichai]

No, look, I'm going to meet the teams right after this. I think we are definitely. It'll take a day or two to settle in. I think it's a new model and in a new area where we made some progress. There could be some regressions, but we will be able to quickly address them through our post training pretty quickly. I think there are some artifacts and behaviors we are seeing which I think are easy to address. So we will. I do think, given it was a day after us putting out a lot of things, I think we had tightened usage limits to avoid outages. But you will see us make progress on usage limits very soon. That is rightfully a source of frustration when you encounter. I feel the same, but those are areas we will address pretty soon and make progress.

[Kevin Roose]

It seems like one thing that some of the AI companies are succeeding at is Focus. Just Anthropic and OpenAI have this sort of relentless focus on coding. OpenAI was criticized last year for sort of spreading their bets too thin, trying to do too many things all at once. They've now sort of tightened that. Do you feel like Google is appropriately focused on coding or are all the other bets you're making taking away resources and time and focus from the Main push.

[Sundar Pichai]

I think all of us saw sometime around there was an inflection point in coding and I think we are all responding to it. I think we all have pretty serious strikes around this area and so I don't see it as an issue for we are a large company and we have scale so we will be able to focus on a few multiple things at the same time. I don't see it as any fundamental issues as much as we are making progress. We're going to make progress. I think we are in the moment in time in this field where 30 to 60 days look like five years. That's all it is.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah. Another thing that got a lot of attention this week was the changes that you all made to the search bar and the sort of front door of Google. The biggest change in 25 years. I think a lot of people expect that at some point the kind of normal Google sort of classic search interface goes away. The 10 blue links maybe go away and you just kind of have this AI mode as the default, but you haven't sort of done that yet. There's a lot of integration but you still can get the 10 blue links if you want them. Do you think that goes away at any point that you to rip the band aid off and just go full AI mode?

[Sundar Pichai]

You know, I think it's important to bring users along the journey as well as making sure the product is working for their expectations. So you know, I try not to get, get ahead of that. I think it is very clear as we evolve through these changes, people are responding positively. We can see it in the long term metrics of the product in such a clear way. Right. And so I think we understand that. But you know, people want search to be fast. I do think through search people are looking to connect with what's out there on the web. So that's important to us. So it's all of that. So I think you're seeing us evolve the product and I think you'll continue to see it be methodical. But you know, we didn't have AI mode a year ago, but now a lot of people are experiencing it. I think we have made it more seamless to go there than before. And so it's a continuum, but I don't see sources and links will always be there as part of it.

[Casey Noon]

He was telling me on the ride down that he feels like he basically has not done a traditional Google search in the past year, that he's sort of fully doing these AI searches. When you hear that, are you like cool like this is the kind of user that I want right now. Or does it send you a little chill because the sort of traditional search ads business is a pretty good one for you?

[Sundar Pichai]

Well, I think we will, if anything, in the AI mode, in an agent, these things are going to do a lot more for you than what we were able to do for users 10 years ago. I think the economic value is always a function of the total value you're giving users. I think all of us would say over time the value we are providing users increases. There's more competition, there are more choices. So I feel comfortable between a combination of subscription and ads that the right models will continue to be there. Adam Smith's rules don't change in this new world.

[Casey Noon]

Let's talk about public perception. The New York Times, CNN did a poll this week, found that only about 16% of people say that AI is mostly good. About 35 say it's mostly bad. What do you make of the AI backlash that we're seeing right now and how much leverage do you think Google has to change that perception?

[Sundar Pichai]

AI is I've always viewed it as the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It's progressing at an extraordinary pace. Humans aren't evolved to process that much change. And I think people, rightfully so, are anxious about what is the future that this technology will bring. So to me, I understand it. I think it feels to me natural with such a profound technology shift. We've had far simpler technology shifts where there has been anxiety around those shifts. This is of a scale unlike anything we've seen before. I think we as an industry have to do a lot more to continue driving and showing the benefits that's possible with the technology. So that is something in our control. We have more work to do to make sure when we are scaling up the infrastructure investments, et cetera, what are the things we can do to make some of that work better. But I think people's concerns are a bit more fundamental around the shift than all of that. I think a natural part of this is people are anxious about their economic future in this world. And you have a lot of conversation where people saying jobs are going to radically change, some of it will go away, et cetera. I happen to think the outlook is better than some of those dire predictions. But. But as a society, if you're hearing it's natural, I would be surprised if people aren't more anxious about it. I do think it's important because the change is happening so fast, you need people to. In democracies, you need citizens to be engaged, be aware that this is happening and make their preferences known. That's what causes action in society. So I think there's something healthy about this dialogue too, which is happening. And given the pace at which the technology is moving forward, it seems right to me, both the concerns and the fact that we need to take it seriously.

[Kevin Roose]

You're giving the commencement speech at Stanford next month. I'm sure you've noticed or heard that a bunch of commencement speakers have been booed recently by college students who are worried about AI. What are you planning to tell the graduates about AI and do you have your boo strategy in place

[Sundar Pichai]

anytime? We have driven technology progress, I think it helps drive progress in the world. And in some ways these graduates are actually both going to be a big part of driving that progress and also dealing with the impact of that technology. So I think we have to be very mindful of that. And I've always been extraordinarily optimistic about the next generation. I think we all always have this view in the world. We are anxious and we worry about the next generation. But I think the next generation rises to the challenge and builds a better world. And so I view it as no different from those moments. And my goal would be to share my experiences and share that with them. And that's what I'm looking to do.

[Kevin Roose]

You can just pretend they're saying gooogle. It's close enough.

[Casey Noon]

I'd be curious to hear a little bit more about your case that like that you think that sure, jobs may change a lot, but you know, you entry level graduate, the economic future is still bright for you. Like, like what is that case in your mind?

[Sundar Pichai]

You know, at a basic level I do think we are, you know, there is a new level of capability. All of us are going to have to be able to do things and, and you know, I wasn't there like when spreadsheets rolled out to people. I wouldn't know how you did financial analysis before that. How did people do it?

[Casey Noon]

I'll say it, I didn't do it. I had no idea how to do it.

[Sundar Pichai]

But spreadsheets changed that. And so there's an aspect of this, I think it just is going to change the starting point for many, many people just even coding, I think if you fast forward the progress we are seeing there, so many more people are going to be able to code in the world. Right. And I've heard you two might be examples of that and like, you know, in that journey. But I think you're just at the Leading edge of what is going to happen more and more. So I think those are the new serendipitous ways this will all work out that we underestimate. I think people are going to be more productive, they will have more time for leisure. All of that will simultaneously be true. There are so many areas where today people's work involves a lot. Doctors have high burnout rates and it's because they train and their calling is to spend time with patients, taking care of patients. But most doctors would tell you if you actually watch their time, the percentage of time they spend with patients is less. Right. So I think AI will actually help them do more of that. I think those are examples of it. The radiologist analogy has been fascinating. It's been now a decade running. I look at myself and I say, well, I've gotten a lot more scans in my life than my dad ever did. And each of the scans have like 10x the amount of information than his scans had because they were constrained by printing film versus us being digital. And I think that number is going to be 10x in 10 years. So where is that projection going into? You are actually going to need AI to keep up with that demand coming. So I think it's nonlinear how the impact of all this will be. This is not. I don't want to be. I don't want in any way to minimize. Every technology shift brings disruption with it. And I think there will be disruption and we as a society need to be super serious about it and engage. And so some of the conversations I think are rightful in thinking through that. But I do think there are many positive dimensions to it which are maybe not being talked about. And also there is overly deterministic dire scenarios which I quite don't agree with as part of it.

[Casey Noon]

Let's talk about agents because I feel like agents actually tie sort of into this question of, well, what is going to make us more productive in the future and how will it change our job? Later this summer you're releasing Spark, which seems sort of intended to be an agent for the regular person. And I'm so curious to know, like, could you walk us through something this agent is doing for you personally?

[Sundar Pichai]

I've used it a lot more in my professional context, more to the context because it was mainly available in my corp account as part of it. In that context, I've definitely used it as it's super easy to use it to prepare for any meeting. I wish I had brought the prompt slash the output for like I just as a test case used it for hard fork.

[Casey Noon]

Honestly, if you emailed to us, we would flash it on the screen.

[Sundar Pichai]

Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. It adds some things about the two of you. So I don't think I can project it.

[Casey Noon]

No, that's what we want. We want that. We want that. We want to know how Jumblite dragged us.

[Sundar Pichai]

I'm not sure I'll allow that too. No, I'm just kidding. Partially kidding.

[Kevin Roose]

You should see Casey's browser history.

[Sundar Pichai]

Partially kidding. But I have had it in my personal account more recently. So again, here's a simple task I did. I just asked it to just look ahead at my meetings and color code it in categories so that I can keep sense of how I'm spending my time. I think it's extraordinary to watch it. It came back with suggestions of two color coding schemes and I just had to choose one. And it's actually like sci fi. It's just like changes the color in the calendar, personal meetings, health related meetings, time I'm spending at work, etc.

[Kevin Roose]

Etc.

[Sundar Pichai]

That's an example of a personal query I just did just to see what's happening. But with agents, I think you have to give people a sense of. I think about this as what allowed us to get someone to sit in the backseat of a self driving car. Right. We did it in steps. And I think there's an element of that where with agents, if something unexpected happens, I think people will back off from this. And so part of it is earning their trust and so giving them a sense of control, transparency. But more importantly, from a security standpoint, these systems can be hacked. And so we want to make sure we are not ahead of the frontier in a wrong way.

[Kevin Roose]

Speaking of meetings and your calendar, we hear that you're headed to the White House for some kind of AI executive order signing. What should the government be doing right now to regulate AI? Do you like this idea of a kind of pre release strategy where the government gets to sort of see models before they're released and sign off on them? Is that a good idea? Is that potentially dangerous if it gives them the ability to censor or jawbone companies into releasing different kinds of models? What's your take on that?

[Sundar Pichai]

Look, we'll have to wait and see the details of the full executive order, but they've engaged with the industry in a very robust way and I think the approach really balances innovation and oversight. We'll have to wait for the details to come out, but there are a few areas which are coming up. We will need more cross industry, cross Industry, government coordination. So it makes sense to me. Cyber is a great example of that. I think we all have to work together. It makes full sense to me. If we have found an exploit which could impact a governmental agency, the government needs to be prepared for it. So there is validity. But of course doing it in a moment with this important technology. But it's important as a country to be at the frontier too, not doing it in a way where you're overly slowing things down and maybe that balance has to shift as we reach more advanced levels of technology. But I think to me this seems like prudent approach in general lives. Part of what we are doing with building Synth ID open, sourcing it and then sharing it with others and more importantly building a consortium together I think is an example of in a different area. These things only work together if you can come together as an industry. So I'm glad they're approaching it in that way.

[Casey Noon]

Another sort of safety related question. All of the big labs are racing toward what you call recursive self improvement. So building AI systems that improve themselves rapidly. Do you think that can be done safely and do you feel like you have a line of sight to it right now?

[Sundar Pichai]

You know, these models are getting better at coding and agentic workflows. And so at some point. You can see in anti gravity Today, in over 12 hours it can build a simple OS from scratch. Right. And that is genuinely those are multiple thousands of hours for somebody to do. Right. So you are seeing some of that in work today. We are all in our products in some version or the other have agents and sub agents in the orchestration of those agents building things together. It's a continuum. Right. And I think we are all definitely making some progress. But in the way people describe rsi, I don't think we are there yet. And that would represent the next level of acceleration and I think would have a lot of implications. But we aren't quite there yet.

[Casey Noon]

Is there a plan for. Oh, I mean great news, Sundar, we just hit rsi. Is there a sort of do we break glass or what happens then?

[Sundar Pichai]

It's a great example of like look, I think all responsible labs. I think if you're approaching moments like that, you would be consulting with. It shouldn't be an internal conversation at that point. I think it has to be a much broader conversation than that. And I think we all have to avoid race conditions at those stages of AGI.

[Kevin Roose]

Right now all the labs are racing to get more compute. There seems to be bottomless demand for compute. They're hoarding it wherever they can, striking deals, building their own data centers. Google is still selling access to TPUs to rivals and other companies in the race. Why? Why aren't you just keeping that for yourselves and your own models?

[Sundar Pichai]

I think each is not a constraint on the other. Right. So as long as we can make enough chips, it's not a constraint. So the right way to think about it is we have GDM and our first party services. If you can think about that as company business cash flows, you're planning for that. And then you have Google Cloud, which is a business and which has revenue cash flows and you're doing long term plan and you're planning for that. Right. So if you didn't have cloud and we weren't providing, we wouldn't be planning those chips anyway. Right. And so that's at the simplest level, obviously, you know, it's a bit more complex than that, but there are a lot of advantages of providing TPUs to others. The fact that researchers at anthropic are using TPU's is what will allow us to make, in addition to us allows us to make the best hardware in terms of next generation. And by the way, we use Nvidia's chips too and the next generation chips are incredible and so we use that and we work too. When you're running platforms, we have a platform side of the business and I've always have worked on many platforms in my life and be it Chrome or Android or Google Cloud, why would you ever open source something or why do you provide this technology? All that makes sense on its own merits. I do think there are advantages. Like I mentioned, it allows us to stay at the frontier. Economies of scale helps in various ways and so it makes a lot of sense that way.

[Kevin Roose]

The last time we had you on, we asked you about AGI and your feelings about the term and at the time you responded that it didn't really matter whether you've reached AGI or not because the systems are going to be very, very capable and Google's strategy should be the same. I noticed that you did not say AGI in your keynote. Demis did, but you did not. What's your relationship with the term AGI today? And sort of the idea that all of this progress is building towards something singular and world changing?

[Sundar Pichai]

Oh, we are, you know, there is inevitable progress towards AGI that's happening. I've long understood it and you know, otherwise I wouldn't have pivoted the company 10 years ago to left. I put that technology at the heart and center of the company. All I meant by that statement was even in this scenario, AGI is going to take 10 years. The technology which three years out will be so much more powerful than what we have today that I don't want people to think because AGI is 10 years out, you don't need to act or prepare. That is all my statement means in those contexts.

[Kevin Roose]

Are you AGI pilled?

[Sundar Pichai]

Well, I absolutely am sure that the technology is making foundational progress towards AGI. I'm less able to predict with certainty whether it's in the three to five year timeframe or five to ten year timeframe. The rate of progress over the last one to two years has made me feel it's on the closer side than not. And I just don't. In your role, running one of the largest companies in the world which has a responsibility to society, the language I choose to use around it might be different than other people. But I think as a company in terms of 10 years ago, the IO stage, I announced TPUs and AI first data centers. Yes. Clearly understood where this technology set it.

[Casey Noon]

Maybe as a last question, one of the more memorable phrases I think from the keynote this year did come from Demis when he said that we're in the foot foothills of the Singularity. Can you tell us like concretely what that means from Google's perspective and should people be excited about that or afraid or both?

[Sundar Pichai]

Look, I've had many conversations with Demis obviously on this topic and I think in this context I think he's defining Singularity as the advent of AGI. I think he's talking in that context and I think if you think regardless of if I remember, I think he had kind of articulated by 2030 or so, I think if you believe that it makes sense to you, that's what you're articulating and it's as simple as that. I think for him that's how we define singularity. And I think Demis, myself, many others, we all feel it's important to if that's what you believe, it's important to articulate that because we are all at the frontier building this technology and hopefully people are listening and I think it's important to as a society we are internalizing that and getting ready for it.

[Kevin Roose]

Sundar Pichai, thanks so much for coming.

[Casey Noon]

Thank you sir.

[Sundar Pichai]

Thanks.

[Kevin Roose]

Great to talk to you. Appreciate it.

[Sundar Pichai]

Take care.

[Casey Noon]

When we come back, a few more highlights from this week in our System update.

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[Kevin Roose]

well Kasey, other than IO, there has been a lot happening this week on some stories that we have covered in the past. So it is time for our segment that we call System Update. All right, update number one is that the Elon Musk OpenAI trial is finally over. After weeks of testimony, we got a verdict on Monday.

[Casey Noon]

And what was that verdict? Kevin?

[Kevin Roose]

Well, after less than two hours of deliberation, the jury came back and unanimously rejected Elon Musk's claims. Not on the merits, but just on the sort of grounds that he had waited too long to file the lawsuit. They said it fell outside of the three year statute of limitations and they basically said we're not gonna even debate the merits cuz it's too late. You're too late, bro.

[Casey Noon]

When is Elon Musk gonna catch a break in this crazy world?

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, so I think the trial ended up being quite important, but not for reasons related to the trial. It was sort of all the evidence and all the gossipy, you know, juice that came out during the trial, it

[Casey Noon]

felt like a stimulus package for the tech media. Yes. Where we just sort of had a steady drip of new lore and it kept us all very entertained. I don't know that we learned very much that, you know, truly affected public sentiment one way or the other, but I definitely learned things from this trial that I'll never forget.

[Kevin Roose]

Yep, me too.

[Casey Noon]

Yeah.

[Kevin Roose]

And Elon Musk is obviously saying he is not done with fighting open AI.

[Casey Noon]

We haven't seen the last of him.

[Kevin Roose]

His lawyer said that he would appeal the decision. And on X he said, quote, creating a precedent to loot charities is incredibly destructive to charitable giving in America. Charitable giving, obviously, something that Elon Musk famously cares a lot about.

[Casey Noon]

Also, one of the great revelations from this trial was that Elon Musk himself had been scheming, like, prior to 2020, to turn OpenAI into a for profit company and even absorb it into Tesla so effectively to do all of the things he would later complain that OpenAI actually did.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah. Do you agree with Musk that this is essentially a technicality and that there's still some substantive issues that need to go to trial here?

[Casey Noon]

Well, I mean, every law, in some sense, is a technicality, Kevin. Like, that's how the legal system works. And he put this one to the test and he lost.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah. Is there any lawsuits you've been waiting to file that you should get in under the statute of limitations?

[Casey Noon]

My backlog of lawsuits is so big. I gotta finish this podcast and get to it.

[Kevin Roose]

All right, update number two. Meta is continuing to reshuffle and shrink its workforce. This Wednesday, the company officially laid off 10% of its workers, roughly 8,000 people. We talked about these rumors on the show a couple months ago in terms of their relationship to AI and the fact that they were seemingly cutting workers to sort of make space for more AI in the organization. We knew that these layoffs were coming, but we also got a new update to the story this week, which is that Meta announced that on top of these layoffs, it is also reassigning 7,000 workers to new initiatives related to building new AI tools and apps. Janelle Gale, Meta's head of HR, said in an internal memo that the restructuring, quote, will make us more productive and make the work more rewarding.

[Casey Noon]

You know, there truly is no company among the big labs that has done as many reorgs of its AI teams that that Meta has done. I mean, like, you could almost like, set your watch to how often these things have been happening.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. This is a company that specializes in Corporate reorganizations and just happens to also make some popular social media.

[Casey Noon]

They monetize their social media, but the problem product is reorg. But, you know, look, I have talked to some people who have actually been sort of impressed with the scale and the scope of what Metta is doing here. Like, if you want to know what does it look like for a big tech company to move heaven and earth to try to catch up in an area where it is behind this is what that looks like. You know, so far, I don't think the efforts have borne much fruit, but look, they have just reassigned 7,000 people to work on initiatives related to AI. And of course, that's in addition to all the other, you know, hiring that they did last year. So, know, I'm far from saying that Meta is back in this race, but of all the reorgs they've done, I do think this is one of the most intriguing.

[Kevin Roose]

Yeah, and I think we should expect, like, a steady drip of stories from Meta over the coming months about how bad morale is. It does seem to be quite bad over there at the moment. That always happens when you do these kind of major shakeups and reorgs. And they're also doing all this, like, employee surveillance stuff that workers are understandably upset about. There was some leaked audio published this week from a meeting in which Zuckerberg basically said, said, look, we've got to train our systems to be good at coding and, and using computers. And the way that we do that is by training them on your computers and your coding, because we have a bunch of really smart people here. And that was sort of his way to sort of explain away why they're surveilling their employees.

[Casey Noon]

Yeah, but I have to say, the, the whiplash between the Meta of today and the Meta that we were covering 10 years ago is pretty extreme. I like, the thought just keeps occurring to me. Meta used to be a fun place to work. They have of lots like a fake main street at their corporate headquarters where you used to be able to walk into a Mexican restaurant where everything was free and you could drink a margarita at lunch. Now, that restaurant may still be there, but I think the margaritas at lunch program is, like, on the decline because these people have to go create training data for large language models now. But, you know, I, I, I have to say to the employees, if you're like, man, this really sucks. Like, you know, I, I mean, my, my heart goes out to you. Everyone should have a job that they like. On the other hand, like, I think it's Been clear for a long time that if you work at Meta, your job is to help Mark Zuckerberg win the race to build AGI before anyone else. Entire point of the company now, like there's not a secondary objective.

[Kevin Roose]

Totally. All right, next update. This one is a system Pope date, because this one has to do with our new Pope.

[Casey Noon]

Did he go on a date?

[Kevin Roose]

No, they're not allowed to do that. But he is set to release his first encyclical on the topic of AI this coming Monday. Pope Leo XIV is expected to release his document, sort of circulated among the church that is meant to guide the clergy. And the surprising part of this is that Chris Ola, one of the co founders of Anthropic, is going to be there at the Vatican to help him launch this thing.

[Casey Noon]

I didn't realize that we did like, launch events for encyclicals. You know, it's like, like the Pope finishes up with Mass and says, but I do have one more thing.

[Kevin Roose]

It's their IO. Yes, this.

[Casey Noon]

This is Vatican IO And I mean, I guess we'll be very curious what the Pope has to say. You know, Kevin, as you know, this Pope seems unusually interested in tech and has had like a relative lot to say about it. You know, short tenure.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes. And I also am very excited about this because I think this does mean that Pope Leo XIV is the most likely Pope to come on hard fork.

[Casey Noon]

Absolutely.

[Kevin Roose]

And if you are in the Vatican listening to us right now, Pope Leo, please come drop your encyclical on our audience.

[Casey Noon]

Your Holiness, we would simply love to create content with you.

[Kevin Roose]

All right, update four. The literary world has been rocked by two new scandals related to AI use by writers. The first is that an award winning short story has been criticized by people who think that it was generated by AI oh, boy. This story was a regional winner of the Commonwealth Foundation's short story prize. It's called the Serpent in the Grove by Jamir Nazir of Trinidad, and it was published online by the British literary magazine Granta. But some readers thought, hey, this thing seems a lot like AI. It had some of the cliches of AI writing. And people claim to have run this through Pangram, the AI detection tool, and found that the story appear to be significantly or entirely generated by AI Yeah,

[Casey Noon]

I'm not sure that the backlash here is warranted because this story has gotten more attention than any previous story written in Granta. Like, I think it's possible more people have read this story than like anyone has read a Granta story in years.

[Kevin Roose]

We have figured out how to rescue fiction and it is just to create controversies around AI.

[Casey Noon]

Yeah.

[Kevin Roose]

The Commonwealth foundation responded to these accusations, saying in a statement that they, quote, place our confidence in the integrity of our contributors and the caliber and experience of the judges and chair of the judging panel and stand by the assurances given by our authors as part of our process.

[Casey Noon]

And I mean, look like we don't know.

[Kevin Roose]

We don't know. We don't know. This is, I predict, like a thing that is going to happen to every major literary prize is that every submission will just have to be run through an AI detector.

[Casey Noon]

Also, we're all now just reading so much AI generated text that I feel like inevitably we are all just going to start writing more like it. And so even when you are writing something by hand, I think there is just a risk that over time it is going to look more like a slop.

[Kevin Roose]

It's not a trend, it's a transformation. There's another writing scandal that came to light this week, this one in the nonfiction world. This was, according to my colleague Ben Mullen at the Times, who wrote that a buzzy new book called the Future of Truth, which is about truth in the age of AI, appears to have included numerous made up or misattributed quotes concocted by AI. The author, Stephen Rosenbaum, acknowledged the errors on Monday. He said that he took full responsibility for the errors, that he used AI tools ChatGPT and Claude during the research, writing and editing process, and that he was working to correct future editions.

[Casey Noon]

This story implicated our dear friend Kara Swisher. Kevin, I don't know if you saw this, but Kara was one of the people who had fabricated quotes attributed to her appear in this book. And it's so funny because if you read the quote that's attributed to her, it does read just like pure chatgpt. Yes. Do you want to hear it?

[Kevin Roose]

Yes.

[Casey Noon]

The most sophisticated AI language model is like a mirror. It reflects our own morality back at us. Polished and articulate, but ultimately empty behind the surface. It's not bound by Asimov's laws or any ethical framework. It's bound by the patterns in its training data and the objectives set by its creators. If you've ever talked to Kara Swisher,

[Kevin Roose]

she has been brain swapped.

[Casey Noon]

A true pod person situation. So, yeah, this, I mean, like, truly, nothing could be funnier about, like, a book about AI and truth just having a bunch of, like, hallucinated slop quotes in it. Yeah. You know, you have often said that, like, anyone who puts a rule into, you know, like a workplace, a school, a publishing house that says, hey, no AI use. All you're doing is telling everyone that they have to lie about their AI.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes.

[Casey Noon]

This seems like, like, we are just kind of, like, hitting some kind of inflection point where it's just becoming obvious that even people who absolutely should not be doing this are still just, like, getting lazy and not doing the work. Yeah.

[Kevin Roose]

And I would say, like, it's not just laziness. Like, there are a lot of things that AI tools can help you with on books. I've been using AI not for writing my book. It's all human generated, but, like, in, you know, collecting endnotes and indexing and, like, various things that are not the main book itself. And I have had to go through with a fine tooth comb to make sure that all of the sources that my AI tools wanted to cite were actually real. And most of them were, but most is not enough, especially if you were writing a book about truth in the age of AI. And so I have had to do some cleanup on that before sending it off to the printer. So I understand how this kind of thing could happen, but you really gotta go through, if you're doing this and make sure that you are not passing off someone. Someone's words that they didn't say.

[Casey Noon]

Well, let this be a lesson to all of the. The writers among our listeners, because Kara

[Kevin Roose]

Swisher will get your ass.

[Casey Noon]

She will absolutely get your ass.

[Kevin Roose]

All right, before we go, we have one more update. This one is very exciting. It is about Hard Fork Live. Yay. That is our upcoming live event in San Francisco on June 10, and we are finally ready to share our guests for the event. Kasey, who do we have?

[Casey Noon]

Well, leading off our lineup this year at Hard Fork Live, Kevin will be Microsoft CEO Sacha Nadell.

[Kevin Roose]

I'm hitting every sound effect on the board right now. There are only two.

[Casey Noon]

This is somebody who we have been trying to talk to ever since we started Hard Fork. Somebody who is at the center of everything that is happening in AI and also just a really fun person to talk to. So thrilled to have Satya as a marquee guest for us at Hard Fork Live.

[Kevin Roose]

Yes, we have a bunch more exciting guests. FIGMA CEO Dylan Field will be there. We've got Cindy Cohn, executive director of

[Casey Noon]

the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

[Kevin Roose]

Plus, we've got a bunch of other great guests, including friend of the pod and fellow tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, AI as Normal Technology Co author Sash Kapoor and AI 2027 author Daniel Cocatello and

[Casey Noon]

you might be wondering, Kevin, will there be any fun surprises this year?

[Kevin Roose]

Will there be any fun surprises this year?

[Casey Noon]

Absolutely. Be some fun surprises for those here's Ordinarily where we would tell you you could get tickets, but you can't. They're also yes, but the good news is we will be of course bringing you all of those conversations here on the podcast in the weeks to to come.

[Kevin Roose]

So fear not.

[Casey Noon]

Hard Fork Live will be part of your life one way or another.

[Kevin Roose]

Can't avoid us. And that was our system update. What? What year is it? Are we snapping again? We're snapping.

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[Casey Noon]

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[Kevin Roose]

Hardfork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones or edited by Viren Pavic or Fact checked by Kit lee and love. Today's show was engineered by Katie McMurran, original music by Alicia Be Itup Marion Lozano, Rowan Nimisto, Alyssa Moxley and Dan Powell. Video production by Veran Pavic Jake Nicol and Chris Schott. You can watch this episode on [e-mail] Hardfork Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Queering Tam and Dalia Haddad. You can email us as [e-mail] SA.

[Sundar Pichai]

Mud, sand, snow. The track. Different surfaces, same truth. Every ground is our proving ground. Ready? Set.

[Kevin Roose]

Forward.