Google unified its AI teams to make decisions faster

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 8:44

   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, OK, I need to actually change how the company works with the competitive moment you were in that got you here? That's a great question. Look, I think for me, I always internalize that moment.

2. 9:07

   It was tough to convey it outside, but I was, you know, we had set the company, you know, I 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 ourselves through our products. But I realized we had to organize ourselves for it.

3. 9:37

   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 deep mind, 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.

4. 10:10

   So I think doing that well. And then at that time, I also set up with Amin Vedat, 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 Cori taking on that role as well. So those were important changes. We obviously made sure Search needed to move faster.

5. 10:43

   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... I help with our labs product and working on Gemini later, driving innovation, as well as, you know, obviously I have 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.

6. 11:23

   I set up these new product reviews once a week. These 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. Yeah. The other decoder question I ask everybody is about decisions. You're describing a lot of