Google CEO Sundar Pichai on the future of search, AI agents, and selling Chrome

You've said many times you think AI will be as profound as electricity over the past many, many years that you and I have talked about it. But you said something yesterday that I think adds to that, which is that we're in a new phase of the platform shift, right? And people have talked about AI being a platform shift for quite a while. That always has meant to me that there's a user interface platform shift coming, right? We're going to interact with computers in natural language in more natural ways, and they will interact with us back in that same way, and everything will change. Is that the platform shift?

You are right. Each of these platform shifts, you know, changes many things. On the I.O. front, nothing to do with Google I.O., just I.O. in the traditional computer science sense, you know, you could feel it. Yesterday when I watched the Android XR, I've used them and played around with them. But watching it, two people talking in different languages, you can envision the future one day where it'll actually be seamless. In a way, you couldn't have done it with phones. You couldn't have done it without AI because there's nothing in your way. You're looking at the other person and talking, right?

And so that is an element of platform shift, but there are many more elements, right? This is the only platform where I think the actual platform is over time capable of creating and self-improving and so on. In a way, we could have never talked about any other platform before. So that's why I think it's much more profound than the other platform shifts. It'll allow people to create new things in a way, you know, because at each layer of the stack, there's going to be profound improvements. And so I think that virtuous cycle you get in terms of how you can unleash this creative power to all of society, be it software engineers, be it creators, I think that is going to happen in a much more multiplicative way.

And that, you know, so when I say it's a next phase, I'm talking about that part, too. Let me just make that more concrete for people. Well, I think the last platform shift we all understand is the shift to mobile. And that was, right, we're going to have multi-touch. We're going to have faster cell connections. We're going to increase processing power that can go with you everywhere. And then there was a layer of applications that was enabled by all of those things. You can push a button and a Toyota Camry will show. up wherever you are in the world, is like a very powerful thing that required all of those ideas.

How would you describe the phase where now compared to that? The phase of this, because the first phase of AI was the transformers work and the models work, and we can all see this capability.

Welcome back. I'm speaking with Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Right before the break, I was asking him how he eventually plans to get a return on all of this AI investment. And it is definitely a lot of investment. And that set us up to discuss some of the new hardware Google showed off at I.O. this year.

So I have to ask you, just before we sat down, OpenAI announced that Johnny Ive was selling a company he had started called I.O. to the company, and Ive and his design consultancy love from would take over all design. They didn't announce a product, but they said it's the future of computing and it's coming next year. Do you anticipate more of that competition, that your competitors who don't have a smartphone operating system will go even harder in this direction?

I'm looking forward to an OpenAI announcement ahead of Google I.O. the night before. First of all, look, stepping back, I mean, Johnny Ive is, you know, one of a kind. You know, you look at this track record over the years, I've definitely met him only once or twice, but, you know, I've admired his work, obviously, like so many of us. So I think it's exciting, shows, you know, this is why I feel like it's such, there's so much innovation ahead. And I think people tend to underestimate this moment. In some ways, people tend to, I always like to point out when the internet happened, Google didn't even exist.

Right? I think what people, so when you think about, I think AI is going to be bigger than the internet. There are going to be companies, products, categories created, which we aren't aware of today. So I think the future looks exciting. I think there's a lot of opportunity to innovate around hardware form factors at this moment with this platform shift. So I'm looking forward to seeing what they do. You know, we are going to be doing a lot as well. And I think it's an exciting time to be a consumer. It's an exciting time to be a developer. So I think looking forward to it. I've, in that video, described the phone and the laptop as legacy platforms, which is very interesting considering his own history.

Are you all the way there that the phone and laptop are legacy platforms? Look, I think these things, if anything, I found through this AI moment using the web a lot more. Right, because I'm like, it's easier to create a VO3 video on my browser and a big screen. And so the way I've internalized this is computing will be available and like, you don't have to make these hard choices. You know, you will, computing will become so essential to you. You're going to have it in multiple ways around you when you need it. Right, like I use a phone. a tablet, a laptop, and I have my workstation, right? And so I have the breadth of it.

But, you know, over time, it makes sense to me at some point in the future, consuming content by pulling out this black glass display rectangle in front of you and looking at it is not the most intuitive way to do it. But, you know, but I think it's going to take some time. I feel like we could do a full hour just on Android tablets and where they could go. We're going to come back for that. A big part of what you're describing implicates search in really big ways, right? We're going to be surrounded by information. Search or Gemini or some future Google product will organize that information, take action for you across the web in some way, and you will have a companion.

And maybe you only pull out your tablet to watch a video or something. A lot of what's going on with search has downstream effects on the web, downstream effects on information providers broadly. Are you starting, last year we spent a lot of time talking about those effects. Are you seeing that play out the way that you thought it would? It depends. I do think people are consuming a lot more information. And, you know, web is one specific format. So we should talk about the web, but zooming back out. There are new platforms like YouTube and others, too. So I think people are just consuming a lot more information, right?

So it feels like an expansionary moment. I think there are more creators. People are putting out more content, you know. And so people are generally doing a lot more. Maybe people have a little extra time in their hands. And so it's a combination of all that. On the web, look, things which have been interesting and, you know, we've had these conversations for a while. You know, obviously in 2015, there was this famous, the web is dead. I always have it somewhere around, you know, which I look at it once in a while. Predictions, it's existed for a while. I think the web is evolving pretty profoundly.

I think that is true. when we crawl, when we look at the number of web pages available to us, that number has gone up by 45% in the last two years alone, right? So that's a staggering thing to think about. Can you detect if that number, if that volume increase is because more pages are generated by AI or not? This is the thing I may be aware of the most, right? It's a good question. We generally have many techniques in search to try and understand the quality of a page, including whether it was machine generated, etc. etc. This trend, that doesn't explain this trend we are seeing, right? So, genuinely, there are more webpages. So, you know, at an underlying level, so I think that's an interesting phenomenon.

I think everybody as a creator, like you do at Verge, I think today, if you're doing stuff, you have to do it in a cross-platform, cross-format way. You know, I look at the quality of video content you put out, it's very sophisticated, right? You know, and very different from how words used to be maybe five to 10 years ago, right? It's profoundly changed. So I think things are becoming more dynamic cross-format. I think the thing, another thing people are underestimating with AI is AI will make it zero friction to move from one format to another, right? Because our models are natively multimodal. We kind of tease people's imagination with audio overviews in Notebook Ella, right? The fact you can throw a bunch of documents at it and you have a podcast and you can join and learn from it.

So I think this notion, the static moment of like, you produce content by format, whereas I think machines can help translate it from, it's almost like different languages and they can go seamlessly between. I think it's one of the incredible opportunities to be unlocked right ahead. And so maybe I didn't want to drift from the question we were having, but I think people are producing a lot of content And I see consumers consuming a lot of content. And, you know, we see it in our products. Others are seeing it, too. So that's how I would probably answer it at the highest level. The way I see it currently is that the web is at an all-time high as an application platform.

Right? The fact that Figma exists and is a successful... as it is in its primary interfaces as a web app is, I think, remarkable. A lot of the products you are talking about are expressed as web apps. Even some of the most interesting search results you showed yesterday are, you know, Google would generate a custom web app for you and display it in a search result to do some data visualization. I think that's all looking incredible. I think the web as a transaction platform is reaching new highs, especially with rulings that mean smartphone makers have to let people push transactions to the web.

There's something very interesting happening there. As a media platform, it feels like it's at an all-time low, right? If I was starting The Verge... You mean the web as a media platform? The web as a media platform, as an information platform. If I was starting The Verge today with 11 of my co-founder and friends, we would start a TikTok channel. We might start a YouTube channel. We would definitely not start a website with the dependencies we have as a website today. And that's the dynamic that it feels like AI is pushing on even harder. I'm not fully sure I agree, right? I think if you were to go and restart Verge again, I bet you would have an extraordinary web presence.

At best, no, I've thought about this a lot. I think at best our web presence would look like a substack or a ghost or something, right? Maybe. Look, I'm not fully sold on that, but you know the space. I acknowledge you know that space better than I do. I don't have that intuition, which you do here. But look, I see, in fact, you say the web application platform is an all-time high, but I've looked, you know, I was wipe coding with Replit a few weeks ago. The power of what you are going to be able to create on the web. We haven't given that power to developers in 25 years. So that is going to come ahead. So, you know, it's not exactly clear to me. Maybe today you're looking at it and say, I wouldn't put all the investment in because it looks like a lot of investment to do that. But that may not be true two years out. If you feel like you would create a TikTok channel, maybe with like 2% extra effort, if you could have a robust web presence, why wouldn't you? And so I'm not fully sold on it, but I think it's a good question to ask. But you have to somehow reconcile that with the fact that overall, that traffic seems to be growing. We see more web pages. Somewhere we have to explain all of that, too.

You know, the publishers, as they often do, responded to Google I.O. announcements.

We have to take another quick break. We'll be back in just a minute. We'll see you next time. In seconds, you'll see exactly what's behind your quota risk and fix it before it's missed. Question answered, action taken, crisis averted. When you have critical business questions that need answers, don't just file a ticket and wait weeks for an outdated report. Describe what you need and have Rippling AI build it instantly from your live people and business data. Whether it's a dashboard with detailed charts or automated workflows with the right triggers, conditions, and approvals.

Ready to rule your business? Head to rippling.ai slash decoder. Get the only AI built to give you full visibility and take complex actions across your entire organization. That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G dot A-I slash decoder. Sign up for exclusive access today. welcome back i'm talking with google ceo sundar pachai about what i think is one of the big questions about the ai everything era what incentives do websites and other apps and services have to play along what pressures will agents put on the web we have today and what kind of web will emerge from it let me just broaden that out to agents right i watched

When you think about those sources of information, one of the things that I am thinking about a lot is, I don't know, the CDC webpages have changed a lot recently, right? Diversity, equity, inclusion language has been removed from pages across the government. Those used to be very high-ranking sources in Google search, right?

We just implicitly trusted the CDC's webpages in some ways. Are you reevaluating that? There might be misinformation on some of these pages that then get synthesized into AI results? Oh, it's a misunderstanding of how search works, right? We don't individually evaluate the authoritativeness of, like, a page, right? And, like, it's what our signals does. In PageRank, obviously our signals are multiple orders of magnitude more complicated than PageRank today. But to use PageRank as an example, we weren't the ones determining how authoritative a page is. It's how other pages were linking to it, like an academic citation, et cetera.

We are not making those decisions today, and so I don't see that changing. As you synthesize more of the answers, do you think you're going to have to take more responsibility for the results? Look, we are giving context around it, but we are still anchoring it in, you know, the sources we find. You know, but we've always felt a high bar, you know, in Google. Last year, when we launched AI Overviews, I think, you know, people are adversely querying to find errors. And the error rate was one in seven million for adversarial queries. And so, but that was a big, but that's the bar we've always operated as a company.

And so I think, to me, nothing has changed. Like, you know, Google operates under a very high bar. That's the bar we strive to meet. And, you know, our search page results are there for everyone to see. But that comes that natural accountability. And, you know, we have to constantly earn people's trust. So that's how I would approach it.

We'll give it a shot. Thank you so much, Sundar. All right. Thanks, Nila. I appreciate it. I'd like to thank Sundar Pichai for taking the time to speak with me on Decoder.

And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, if you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at theverge.com. We really do read all the emails.