Pichai expects a productivity leap from AI agents in 2027

Transcript

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

1. 8:34

   as well there's aspects of argon i'm interested in one thing i saw was that it beat minecraft on its own in a little over a day with i think only less than 2000 in compute which is pretty impressive i'm curious what the implications of this level of agentic capability i mean a video game is one thing, but you could extrapolate that to potentially a lot of things. That's advanced decision-making, long horizon task, right? Minecraft. When you see that, what do you think and how does that impact how you plan ahead? We've had internal versions where, for example, with Argonne, we have seen this like step change in internal productivity ever since Argonne has been rolled out internally. A version of internally there, for example, there are large code bases on which we have pointed it to, and it's gone.

2. 9:23

   Let's say we've had problems which we know we need to fix. It's millions of lines of code to be defacted. Yeah. You know, in Chromium, et cetera, you know, if you want to create an experience where you can drag out a tab, it's moved around, put it in an AI experience. How do you keep it live without reloading? That's the kind of like, you can get excited about this feature in your head, but historically for teams, it cuts through all layers of Chromium.

3. 9:49

   So, but you can point org on at it and it can persistently go and work through it and get it done. So we are seeing examples like that everywhere. So what that excites me is I think if in some ways I view 2027 as a golden age of that productivity frontier for us because of the new class of models and how well we are integrating it with our internal environments. You can also apply these models to deeply improve model development itself, right? And what we in the industry talk about as recursive self-improvement. So those are all practically, I think, areas where you will see continued progress, which is exciting to me.

4. 10:37

   Look, I think what you saw in Minecraft, you know, from now on, I think we are, the capability frontier is there where you can, in a dedicated way, apply, assuming you have the compute and resources, deeper progress on many areas than we have before. Any verifiable domain, really, right? Yeah. And, you know, for sure. Yeah. Even in other areas, you can always have humans in the loop to give feedback and keep making progress, right?

5. 11:01

   And so it feels like infinite possibilities. It's one of those moments where you think about, you know, if you can think about a thing, you know, you can apply it and make progress. And you've seen that with mathematics recently, you know, and so things which you would think would take a long time, you can point and put effort into it and show dramatic progress like OpenAI did with mathematics with the recent model.

6. 11:28

   So I think we're going to see a lot more of that in 2027. in yeah i've heard sergey also talking about rsi recently and pushing the teams on that and i'm curious like where is google at on rsi internally how much of current research and development is i assume most of it's being assisted by the models but where are we at on that continuum of the models really pushing there's a lot of humans in the loop on these things and given the safety aspects of it, but we are definitely At a stage where AI researchers are co-working with the models in a deep way, right?

7. 12:06

   And, you know, the models are involved in maybe suggesting recipes, automatically evaluating next checkpoints. And, you know, so there's a healthy amount of models and researchers co-working. There are aspects of the pipeline which are, like, probably closer to being, like, you know, what I would say in this continuum, more RSI like. Some of them are lesser, but the whole continuum is shifting. So, you know, these are the reasons I think, you know, it's important to think about how we develop the frontier as we go through it.

8. 12:40

   But, you know, I would expect the next 12 months to see continued acceleration because of RSI.