Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet | Lex Fridman Podcast #471

to kind of get the visual in your head. You know, pre-computers was a lot of free time. Now that I think about it, now you have to go and seek that quiet solitude or something. Newspapers, books is how I gained access to the worst information at the time, you will. My grandfather was a big influence. He worked in the post office. He was so good with language. His English, his handwriting till today is the most beautiful handwriting I've ever seen. He would write so clearly. He was so articulate. And so he kind of got me introduced into books. He loved politics. So we could talk about anything. And that was there in my family throughout. So lots of books, trashy books, good books, everything from Ayn Rand to books on philosophy to stupid crime novels.

So books was a big part of my life. But that kind of, this whole, it's not surprising I ended up at Google because Google's mission kind of always resonated deeply with me, this access to knowledge. I was hungry for it, but definitely have fond memories of my childhood. Access to knowledge was there. So that's the wealth we had. Uh, you know, every aspect of technology I had to wait for a while. I've obviously spoken before about how long it took for us to get a phone, about five years, but it's not the only thing. A telephone. There was a five-year waiting list, uh, and we got a rotary, uh, telephone, but it dramatically changed our lives. You know, people would come to our house to make calls to their loved ones. You know, I would have to go all the way to the hospital to get blood test records. And it would take two hours to go. And they would say, sorry, it's not ready. Come back the next day. Two hours to come back. And that became a five-minute thing. So as a kid, like, I mean, this light bulb went in my head, you know, this power of technology to kind of change people's lives. We had no running water. You know, it was a massive drought. So they would get water in these trucks, maybe eight buckets per household. So me and my brother, sometimes my mom, we would

wait in line, get that and bring it back home. Many years later, like we had running water and we had a water heater and you would get hot water to take a shower. I mean, like, so, you know, for me, everything was discreet like that. And so I've always had this thing, you know. firsthand feeling of, like, how technology can dramatically change, like, your life and, like, the opportunity it brings. So, you know, that was kind of a subliminal takeaway for me throughout growing up. And, you know, I kind of actually observed it and felt it, you know. So we had to convince my dad for a long time to get a VCR. Do you know what a VCR is? Yeah. I'm trying to date you now. But, you know, because before that, you only had like kind of one TV channel, right? That's it. And so, you know, you can watch movies or something like that. But this was by the time I was in 12th grade, we got a VCR, you know, it was like a Panasonic, which we had to go to some like shop, which had kind of smuggled it in, I guess. And that's where we bought a VCR. But then being able to record like a World Cup football game and then or like get bootlegged videotapes and watch movies, like all that. So like, you know, I had

these discreet memories growing up. And so, you know, always left me with the feeling of like how getting access to technology drives that step change in your life. I don't think you'll ever be able to equal the first time you get hot water. To have that convenience of going and opening a tap and have hot water come out, yeah. It's interesting. We take for granted the progress we've made. If you look at human history, just those plots that look at GDP across 2,000 years, and you see that exponential growth to where most of the progress happened since the Industrial Revolution. And we just take for granted. We forget how far we've gone. So our ability to understand how great we have it and also how quickly technology can improve is quite poor.

Oh, I mean, it's extraordinary. You know, I go back to India now, the power of mobile. You know, it's mind-blowing to see the progress through the arc of time. It's phenomenal. What advice would you give to young folks listening to this all over the world who look up to you and find your story inspiring? Who want to be maybe the next Sundar Bichai, who want to start, create companies, build something that has a lot of impact on the world? Look, you have a lot of luck along the way, but you obviously have to make smart choices. You're thinking about what you want to do. Your brain is telling you something.

But when you do things, I think it's important to kind of get that, listen to your heart and see whether you actually enjoy doing it, right? That feeling of, if you love what you do, it's so much easier and you're going to see the best version of yourself. It's easier said than done. I think it's tough to find things you love doing. but i think kind of listening to your heart a bit more than your mind in terms of figuring out what you want to do i think i think it's one of the best things i would tell people the second thing is i mean trying to work with people who you feel at various points in my life i've worked with people who i felt were better than me right kind of like you know you almost are sitting in a room talking to someone and they're like wow like you know you know and you want that feeling a few times. Trying to get yourself in a position where you're working with people who you feel are kind of like stretching your abilities is what helps you grow, I think. So putting yourself in uncomfortable situations. And I think often you'll surprise yourself. So I think being open minded enough to kind of put yourself in those positions is maybe another thing I would say.

Well, lessons can we learn, maybe from an outsider perspective, for me, looking at your story and gotten to know you a bit. You're humble, you're kind. Usually when I think of somebody who has had a journey like yours and climbs to the very top. leadership, in a cut-throat world, they're usually going to be a bit of an asshole. So what wisdom are we supposed to draw from the fact that your general approach is of balance, of humility, of kindness, listening to everybody? What's your secret? I do get angry. I do get frustrated. I have the same emotions all of us do, right, in the context of work and everything.

But a few things, right, I think... You know, I, over time, I figured out the best way to get the most out of people. You know, you kind of find mission-oriented people who are on the Shad journey, who have this inner drive to excellence, to do the best. And, you know, you kind of motivate people and you can achieve a lot that way, right? And so it often tends to work out that way. But have there been times like, you know, I lose it? Yeah. But, you know, not maybe less often than others. And maybe over the years, less and less so, because, you know, I find it's not needed to achieve what you need to do.

So losing your shit has not been productive. Yeah. Less often than not. I think people respond to that. Yeah. They may do stuff to react to that, like what you actually want them to do the right thing. And so, you know, maybe there's a bit of like sports, you know, I'm a sports fan, in football coaches, in soccer, that football, you know, people often talk about like man management, right? Great coaches do, right? I think there is an element of that in our lives. How do you get the best out of the people you work with? You know, at times you're working with people who are so committed to achieving, if they've done something wrong, they feel it more than you do, right?

So you treat them differently than, you know, occasionally there are people who you need to clearly let them know, like, that wasn't okay or whatever it is. But I've often found that not to be the case. And sometimes the right words at the right time, spoken firmly, can reverberate through time. Also, sometimes the unspoken words. You know, people can sometimes see that, like, you know, you're unhappy without you saying it. And so sometimes the silence can deliver that message even more. Sometimes less is more. Who's the greatest soccer player of all time? Messi or Ronaldo or Pele or Maradona?

I'm going to make, you know, in this question. Is this going to be a political answer? I will tell the truthful answer. So it's messy. It is. You know, it's been interesting because my son is a big Cristiano Ronaldo fan. And so we've had to watch El Clasico together, you know, with that dynamic in there. I so admire CR Simmons. I mean, I've never seen an athlete more committed to that kind of excellence. And so he's one of the all-time greats. but you know for me messy is it yeah when i see leon messi you just are in awe that humans are able to achieve that level of greatness and genius and artistry when we talk we'll talk about ai maybe robotics and this kind of stuff that level of genius i'm not sure you can possibly match by ai in a long time it's just an example of greatness and you have that kind of greatness in other disciplines, but in sport, you get to visually see it, unlike anything else.

It's just the timing, the movement. There's just genius. I had the chance to see him a couple of weeks ago. He played in San Jose against the Quakes, so I went to see it, see the game. I was a fan on the, had good seats, knew where he would play in the second half, hopefully, and even at his age, just watching him when he gets the ball, that movement, you know You're right, that special quality. It's tough to describe, but you feel it when you see it, yeah. He's still got it. If we rank all the technological innovations throughout human history, let's go back maybe the history of human civilizations 12,000 years ago, and you rank them by how much of a productivity multiplier they've been.

So we can go to electricity or the labor mechanization of the industrial revolution, or we can go back to the first agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago. In that long list of inventions, do you think AI, when history is written a thousand years from now, do you think it has a chance to be the number one productivity multiplier? It's a great question. Look, many years ago, I think it might've been 2017 or 2018, I said at the time, AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It'll be more profound than fire or electricity. So I have to back myself. I still think that's the case. When he asked this question, I was thinking, well, do we have a recency bias, right? In sports, it's very tempting to call the current person you're seeing the greatest player, right? And so is there a recency bias? And I do think from first principles, I would argue AI will be bigger than all of those. I didn't live through those moments. You know, two years ago, I had to go through a surgery, and then I processed that there was a point in time people didn't have anesthesia when they went through these procedures.

At that moment, I was like, that has got to be the greatest invention humanity has ever done, right? So look, we don't know what it is to have lived through those times. But, you know, many of what you're talking about were kind of this general things, which pretty much affected everything, you know, electricity or Internet, etc. But I don't think we've ever dealt with a technology, both which is progressing so fast, becoming so capable. It's not clear what the ceiling is. And the main unique, it's recursively self-improving, right? It's capable of that. And so the fact it is going, it's the first technology will kind of dramatically accelerate creation itself, like creating things, building new things, can improve and achieve things on its own, right?

I think like puts it in a different league, right? And so, different league. And so I think the impact it will end up having will far surpass everything we've seen before. obviously with that comes a lot of important things to think and wrestle with but i definitely think that'll end up being the case especially if it gets to the point of where we can achieve superhuman performance on the ai research itself so it's a technology that may it's an open question but it may be able to achieve a level to where the technology itself can create itself better than it could yesterday it's like the move 37 of alpha research or whatever it is right Like, you know, and when, yeah, you're right, when it can do novel, self-directed research, obviously, for a long time, we'll have hopefully always humans in the loop and all that stuff.

And these are complex questions to talk about. But yes, I think the underlying technology, you know, I've said this, like if you watched seeing AlphaGo start from scratch, be clueless and like become better through the course of a day, you know, like, you know, kind of like, kind of like, you know, really hits you when you see that happen. And even our like the VO3 models, if you sample the models when they were like 30% done and 60% done and looked at what they were generating. And you kind of see how it all comes together. It's kind of like, I would say, it's kind of inspiring, a little bit unsettling, right, as a human.

So all of that is true, I think. Well, the interesting thing of the Industrial Revolution, electricity, like you mentioned, you can go back to the, again, the agriculture, the first agricultural revolution. There's what's called the Neolithic package of the first agricultural revolution. that it wasn't just that the nomads settled down and started planting food, but all this other kind of technology was born from that, and it's included in this package. It wasn't one piece of technology. There's these ripple effects, second and third order effects that happen, everything from something silly, like silly, profound, like pottery that can store liquids and food to something we kind of take for granted, but social hierarchies and political hierarchies.

So like early government was formed because it turns out if humans stop moving and have some surplus food, they start coming up with, they get bored and they start coming up with interesting systems and then trade emerges, which turns out to be a really profound thing. And like I said, government, I mean, there's just second and third order effects from that, including that package is incredible and probably extremely difficult if you ask one of the people in the nomadic tribes to predict that it would be impossible it's difficult to predict but all that said what do you think are some of the early things we might see in the quote-unquote ai package i mean most of it probably we don't know today but like you know the one thing which we can tangibly start seeing now is you know obviously with the coding progress you got a sense of it it's going to be so easy to imagine like thoughts in your head translating that into things that exist that'll be part of the package right like it's going to empower almost all of humanity to kind of express themselves maybe in the past you could have expressed with words but like you could kind of build things into existence, right?

You know, maybe not fully today. We are at the early stages of Vibe coding. You know, I've been amazed at what people have put out online with VO3, but it takes a bit of work, right? You have to stitch together a set of prompts, but all this is going to get better. The thing I always think about, this is the worst it'll ever be, right? Like at any given moment in time. Yeah, it's interesting you went there as kind of a first thought. So the exponential increase of access to creativity software creation are you creating a program a piece of content for to be shared with others games down the line all of that like just becomes infinitely more possible well i think the big thing is that uh it makes it accessible it unlocks the cognitive capabilities of the entire eight billion no i agree look think about 40 years ago maybe in the u.s there were five people who could do what you were doing, like go do an interview.

But today, think about with YouTube and other products, et cetera, like how many more people are doing it? So I think this is what technology does, right? Like when the internet created blogs, you heard from so many more people. So I think, but with AI, I think that number won't be in the few hundreds of thousands. you'll be tens of millions of people maybe even a billion people like putting out things into the world in a deeper way and i think it'll change the landscape of creativity and makes a lot of people nervous like for example uh whatever fox msnbc cnn are really nervous about this part like you mean this dude in a suit could just do this and you and youtube and and and thousands of others tens of thousands millions of other creators can do the same kind of thing that makes them nervous and now you get a podcast from notebook lm it's about five to ten times better than any podcast i've ever done i'm joking at this time but maybe not and that changes you have to evolve because i on the podcasting front i'm a fan of podcasts much more than i am a fan of being a host or whatever if there's great podcasts that are both ais i'll just stop doing this podcast i'll listen to that podcast but you have to evolve

and you have to change and that makes people really nervous i think but it's also really exciting future the only thing i may say is i do think like in a world in which there are two ai I think people value and choose, just like in chess, you and I would never watch Stockfish 10 or whatever, and AlphaGo play against each. Like, it would be boring for us to watch. But Magnus Carlsen and Gukesh, that game would be much more fascinating to watch. So it's tough to say. Like, one way to say is, you'll have a lot more content, and so you will be listening to AI-generated content because sometimes it's efficient, et cetera.

But the premium experiences you value might be a version of like the human essence, wherever it comes through. Going back to what we talked earlier about watching Messi dribble the ball. I don't know, one day I'm sure a machine will dribble much better than Messi. But I don't know whether it would evoke that same emotion in us. So I think that'll be fascinating to see. I think the element of podcasting or audio books that is about information gathering, that part might be removed or that might be more efficiently and in a compelling way done by AI. But then it'll be just nice to hear humans struggle with the information, contend with the information, try to internalize it, combine it with the complexity of our own emotions and consciousness and all that kind of stuff.

But if you actually want to find out about a piece of history, you go to Gemini. If you want to see Lex struggle with that history, or other humans, you look at that. But the point is it's going to change the nature, continue to change the nature of how we discover information, how we consume the information, how we create the information. The same way that YouTube changed everything completely, changed news. And that's something our society is struggling with Yeah, YouTube, look, YouTube enabled I mean, you know this better than anyone else It's enabled so many creators There is no doubt in me that, like, we will enable more filmmakers than there have ever been, right?

You're going to empower a lot more people So I think there is an expansionary aspect of this Which is underestimated, I think I think it'll unleash human creativity in a way that hasn't been seen before. It's tough to internalize. The only way it is, if you brought someone from the 50s or 40s and just put them in front of YouTube, you know, I think it would blow their mind away. Similarly, I think we would get blown away by what's possible in a 10 to 20 year timeframe. Do you think there's a future, how many years out is it that let's say let's put a marker on it 50 of content in a good content 50 of good content is generated by vo456 you know i think depends on what it is for um like you know maybe if you look at movies today with cgi there are great filmmakers like you still look at like who the directors are and who use it there are filmmakers who don't use it at all you value that There are people who use it incredibly.

You know, think about somebody like a James Cameron, like what you would do with these. tools in his hands. But I think there'll be a lot more content created, just like writers today use Google Docs and not think about the fact that they're using a tool like that. People will be using the future versions of these things. It won't be a big deal at all to them. I've gotten a chance to get to know Darren Aronofsky. Well, he's been really leaning in and try to figure it's it's fun to watch a genius who came up before any of this was even remotely possible he created pie one of my favorite movies and from there just continued to create a really interesting variety of movies and now he's trying to see how can ai be used to create compelling films you have people like that you have people i've gotten just no uh edgier folks uh they're ai first like door brothers both aronofsky and door brothers create at the edge of the overton window of society you know they push whether it's uh sexuality or or violence it's edgy like artists are but it's still classy doesn't cross that line uh whatever that line is you know um 100s thompson has this line that the uh the only way to find out where the edge where the line is

is by crossing it and i think for artists that's true that's kind of their purpose sometimes comedians and artists just cross that line i wonder if you can comment on the weird place that

to Gemini and said, can you ask a novel question that's not in these notes? And it wrote, Gemini continues to really surprise me, really surprise me. It's been really beautiful. It's an incredible model. The question it generated was, you, meaning Sundar, told the world Gemini's churning out

480 trillion tokens a month uh what's the most life-changing five-word sentence hiding in that haystack that's a gemini question but it made me it gave me a sense i don't think you can answer that but it gave me it made it woke me up to like all of these tokens are providing little aha moments for people across the globe so that's like learning that those tokens are people are curious they ask a question, and they find something out. And it truly could be life-changing. Oh, it is. Look, you know, I had the same feeling about search many, many years ago. You know, you definitely, you know, this tokens per month is like grown 50 times in the last 12 months. Is that accurate, by the way? Yeah, it is. It is accurate. I'm glad it got it right.

But, you know, that number was 9.7 trillion tokens per month 12 months ago, right? It's gone up to 480. It's a 50x increase. So there's no limit to human curiosity. And I think it's one of those moments. Maybe, I don't think it is there today, but maybe one day there's a five-word phrase which says what the actual universe is or something like that and something very meaningful. but I don't think we are quite there yet. Do you think the scaling laws are holding strong?

blowing progress on many dimensions. Maybe AI can create videos. We have to figure out as a society, how do we, we need some system by which we all agree that this is AI generated and we have to

disclose it in a certain way because how do you distinguish reality otherwise yeah there's so many interesting things you said so first of all just looking back at this recent now feels like distant history with google brain i mean that was before tensorflow before tensorflow was made public and open sourced so the tooling matters too combined with github ability to share code then you have the ideas of attention transformers and the diffusion now and then there might be a new idea that seems simple in retrospect, but it will change everything. And that could be the post-training, the inference, time, innovations.

And I think Shad Cien tweeted that Google is just one great UI from completely winning the AI race. Meaning like, UI is a huge part of it. Like how that intelligence, I think Logan Koeh-Patrick likes to talk about this right now, it's an LLM, but it becomes, like when is it gonna become a system where you're talking about shipping systems versus shipping the particular model. Yeah, that matters too, how the system is manifest itself and how it presents itself to the world. That really, really matters. Oh, hugely so. There are simple UI innovations which have changed the world, right? And I absolutely think so.

We will see a lot more progress in the next couple of years. I think AI itself on a self-improving track for UI itself, Like, you know, today we are, like, constraining the models. The models can't quite express themselves in terms of the UI to people. But that is, like, you know, if you think about it, we've kind of boxed them in that way. But given these models can code, you know, they should be able to write the best interfaces to express their ideas over time, right? That is an incredible idea. Yeah. So the API is already open. So you create a really nice agentic system that continually improves the way you can be talking to an AI. But a lot of that is the interface. And then, of course, the incredible multimodal aspect of the interface that Google has been pushing.

These models are natively multimodal. They can easily take content from any format, put it in any format they can write a good user interface they probably understand your preferences better than over time like you know and so so all this is like the evolution ahead right and so um that goes back to where we started the conversation i like i think there'll be dramatic evolutions in the years ahead maybe one more kitchen question uh this even further ridiculous concept of p-doom so the philosophically minded folks in the ai community think about the probability that agi and then asi might destroy all of human civilization i would say my p-doom is about 10 do you ever think about this kind of long-term threat of asi and what would your p-doom be? Look, I mean, for sure. Look, I've both been very excited about AI, but I've always felt this is a technology, you know, we have to actively think about the risks and work very, very hard to harness it in a way that it all works out well. On the PDOOM question, look, it wouldn't surprise you to say that's probably another micro kitchen conversation that pops up once in a while. And given how powerful the technology is, maybe stepping back, when you're

running a large organization, if you can align the incentives of the organization, you can achieve pretty much anything. If you can get people all marching in towards a goal in a very focused way, in a mission-driven way, you can pretty much achieve anything. But it's very tough to organize all of humanity that way. But I think if PDOM is actually high, at some point, all of humanity is like aligned in making sure that's not the case, right? And so we'll actually make more progress against it, I think. So the irony is, so there is a self-modulating aspect there. Like I think if humanity collectively puts their mind to solving a problem, whatever it is, I think we can get there. So because of that, you know, I will.

I think I'm optimistic on the P-Doom scenarios, but that doesn't mean I think the underlying risk is actually pretty high. But I have a lot of faith in humanity kind of rising up to meet that moment. That's really, really well put. I mean, as the threat becomes more concrete and real, humans do really come together and get their shit together. Well, the other thing I think people don't often talk about is probability of doom without AI. So there's all these other ways that humans can destroy themselves, and it's very possible, at least I believe so, that AI will help us become smarter, kinder to each other, more efficient.

It'll help more parts of the world flourish where it would be less resource constrained, which is often a source of military conflict and tensions and so on. So we also have to load into that. What's the P-Doom without AI? P-Doom with AI and P-Doom without AI? Because it's very possible that AI will be the thing that saves us, saves human civilizations from all the other threats. I agree with you. I think it's insightful. Look, I felt like to make progress on some of the toughest problems would be good to have AI like pair helping you. Right. And like, you know, so that resonates with me for sure. Yeah.

quick pause bath and break let's do that if notebook lm was the same like what i saw today with beam if it was compelling in the same kind of way blew my mind it was incredible i didn't think it's possible i didn't think it's possible can you imagine like the u.s president the chinese president being able to do something like beam with the live meat translation working well so they're both sitting and talking make progress a bit more uh yeah just uh for people listening took a quick bathroom break and now we're talking about the demo i did we'll probably post it somewhere somehow maybe here the i got a chance to experience beam and it was it's hard to it's hard to describe it in words how real it felt with just what is it six cameras it's incredible it's incredible it's it's one of of toughest products of you can't quite describe it to people even when we show it in slides etc like you don't know what it is you have to kind of experience it on the world leaders front on politics geopolitics that there's something really special again we're studying world war ii and uh how much could have been saved if chamberlain met stalin in person and i sometimes also struggle explaining to people, articulating why I believe meeting in person for world leaders

is powerful. It just seems naive to say that, but there is something there in person. And with I felt that same thing. And then I'm unable to explain. All I kept doing is what like a child does. You look real, you know? And I mean, I don't know if that makes meetings more productive or so on, but it certainly makes them more, uh, the same reason you want to show up to work versus remote sometimes, that human connection. I don't know what that is. It's hard to, it's hard to put into words. Um, there's some, there's something beautiful about great teams collaborating on a thing that's, that's not captured by the productivity of that team or by whatever on paper some of the most beautiful moments you experience in life is at work pursuing a difficult thing together for many months there's nothing like it you're in the trenches and yeah you do form bonds that way for sure and to be able to do that like somewhat remotely in that same personal touch i don't know that's a deeply fulfilling thing i know a lot of people i personally hate meetings because a significant percent of meetings when done uh poorly are don't don't serve a clear purpose so but that's a meeting problem that's not a communication problem if you can improve the communication for the meetings that are useful

it's just incredible so yeah i was blown away by the great engineering behind it and then we get to see what impact that has that's really interesting but just incredible engineering Really impressive. It is. And obviously, we'll work hard over the years to make it more and more accessible. But yeah, even on a personal front, outside of work meetings, a grandmother who's far away from her grandchild and being able to have that kind of an interaction, all that I think will end up being very mean. Nothing substitutes being in person. It's not always possible. You could be a soldier deployed, trying to talk to your loved ones.

And so I think, you know, so that's what inspires us.

we were set up better than most companies in the world to go realize that vision.

you? Our current plan is AI mode is going to be there as a separate tab for people who really want to experience that, but it's not yet at the level where our main search page is. But as features work, we'll keep migrating it to the main page. And so you can view it as a continuum. AI mode will offer you the bleeding edge experience, but things that work will keep overflowing to AI overviews and the main experience.

And the idea that AI mode will still take you to the web, to the human-created web. Yes, that's going to be a core design principle for us. So really, if users decide, right, they drive this. Yeah. It's just exciting, a little bit scary, that it might change the internet. Because Google has been dominating with a very specific... look and idea of what it means to have the internet and to as you move to ai mode i mean it's just a different experience um i think liz was talking about i think you've mentioned that you ask more questions you ask longer questions dramatically different types of questions yeah like it actually fuels curiosity like i think it's for me i've been asking just a much larger number of questions of this black box machine let's say whatever it is and and with the eye over you it's interesting because i still value the human i still ultimately want to end up on the human created web but i like you said the context really helps it helps us deliver higher quality referrals right you know where people are like they have much higher likelihood of finding what they're looking for, they're exploring, they're curious, their intent is getting satisfied more. So that's what all our metrics show. It makes the humans that create the web nervous.

The journalists are getting nervous. They've already been nervous. Like I mentioned, CNN is nervous because of podcasts. It makes people nervous. Look, I think news and journalism will play an important role, you know, in the future. We're pretty committed to it, right? And And so I think making sure that ecosystem, in fact, I think we'll be able to differentiate ourselves as a company over time because of our commitment there. So it's something I think, you know, I definitely value a lot. And as we are designing, we'll continue prioritizing approaches. I'm sure for the people who want, they can have a fine-tuned AI model that's clickbait hit pieces that will replace current journalism.

That's a shot of journalism, forgive me. But I find that if you're looking for really strong criticism of things, that Gemini is very good at providing that. Oh, absolutely. It's better than anything. For now, I mean, people are concerned that there would be bias that's introduced that as the AI systems become more and more powerful, there's incentive from sponsors to roll in and try to control the output of the AI models. But for now, the objective criticism that's provided is way better than journalism. Of course, the argument is the journalists are still valuable. But then, I don't know, the crowdsourced journalism that we get on the open internet is also very, very powerful.

I feel like they're all super important things. I think it's good that you get a lot of crowdsourced information coming in. But I feel like there is real value for high quality journalism, right? And I think these are all complementary. I think, like I view this, I find myself constantly seeking out also, like try to find objective reporting on things too. And sometimes you get more context from the crowdfunded sources you read online. But I think both end up playing a super important role. So there's, you've spoken a little bit about this. Demis talked about this. It's sort of the slice of the web that will increasingly become about providing information for agents.

So we can think about is like two layers of the web. One is for humans, one is for agents. Do you see the AI agents? Do you see the one that's for AI agents growing over time? Do you see there still being long-term, five, ten years value for the human created human created for the purpose of human consumption web, or will it all be agents in the end? Today, like not everyone does, but you know, you go to a big retail store, you love walking the aisle, you love shopping or grocery store picking out food, etc. But they're also online shopping, and they're delivering, right? So both are complementary, and that's true for restaurants, etc.

So I do feel like over time, websites will also get better for humans. They will be better designed. AI might actually design them better for humans. So I expect the web to get a lot richer and more interesting and better to use. At the same time, I think there'll be an agentic web which is also making a lot of progress and you have to solve the business value and the incentives to make that work well right like for people to participate in it but i think both will coexist and obviously the agents may not need the same i mean not may not they won't need the same design and UI paradigms which humans need to interact with.

it's one when i first saw over a decade ago a waymo vehicle a google self-driving car vehicle it was it was for me it was an aha moment for robotics it made me fall in love with robotics even more than before gave me a glimpse into the future so it's incredible i'm truly grateful for that project for what it symbolizes but it's also a crazy moonshot it's for for a long time waymo has been just, like you mentioned, with scuba diving, just not listening to anybody, just calmly improving the system better and better, more testing, just expanding the operational domain more and more. First of all, congrats on 10 million paid robo-taxi rides.

What lessons do you take from Waymo about the perseverance, the persistence on that project? I look really proud of the progress we have had with Waymo One of the things I think we were very committed to, you know, the final 20% can look like, I mean, we always say, right, the first 80% is easy. The final 20% takes 80% of the time. I think we definitely were working through that phase with Waymo, but I was aware of that. So, but, you know, we knew we were at that stage. We knew. We were the technology gap between, well, there were many people, many other self-driving companies. We knew the technology gap was there.

In fact, right at the moment when others were doubting Waymo is when, I don't know, I made the decision to invest more in Waymo, right? Because so in some ways it's counterintuitive. But I think, look, we've always been a deep technology company and like, you know, Waymo is a version of kind of building a AI robot that works well. And so we get attracted to problems like that, the caliber of the teams there, you know, phenomenal teams. And so I know you follow the space super closely. You know, I'm talking to someone who knows the space well, but it was very obvious it's going to get there. And, you know, there's still more work to do. But we, you know, it's a good example where we always prioritized being ambitious and safety at the same time. Right. And equally committed to both and pushed hard and, you know, couldn't be more thrilled with how it's working, how much people love the experience. And this year is definitely we've scaled up a lot and we'll continue scaling up in 26.

That said, the competition is heating up. You've been friendly with Elon, even though technically as a competitor, but you've been friendly with a lot of tech CEOs in that way, just showing respect towards them and so on. What do you think about the robotaxi efforts that Tesla is doing? Do you see this competition? What do you think? Do you like the competition? We are one of the earliest and biggest backers of SpaceX as Google, right? Right. So, you know, thrilled with what SpaceX is doing and fortunate to be investors as a company there. Right. And and look, we don't compete with Tesla directly.

We are not making cars, et cetera. Right. We are building L45 autonomy. We're building a Waymo driver, which is general purpose and can be used in many settings. They are obviously working on making Tesla self-driving, too. I'm just assuming it's a de facto that Elon would succeed in whatever he does. So, you know, that is not something I question. So, but I think we are so far from these spaces are such vast spaces. Like, I think, think about transportation, the opportunity space. The Waymo Driver is a general purpose technology we can apply in many situations. so you have a vast green space in all future scenarios i see tesla doing well and you know way more doing well like we mentioned with the neolithic package i think it's very possible that in the quote-unquote ai package when the history is written autonomous vehicles self-driving cars is like the big thing that changes everything imagine over a period of a decade or two just the complete transition from manually driven to autonomous in ways we might not predict.

It might change the way we move about the world completely. So the possibility of that, and then the second and third order effects, as you're seeing now with Tesla, very possibly you would see some internally with Alphabet, maybe Waymo, maybe some of the Gemini robotics stuff, it might lead you into the other domains of robotics. Because we should remember that Waymo is a robot. It just happens to be on four wheels. So you said that the next big thing, we can also throw that into the AI package, the big aha moment might be in the space of robotics. What do you think that would look like? Demis and the Google DeepMind team is very focused on Gemini Robotics, right? So we are definitely building the underlying models well. So we have a lot of investments there. And I think we are also pretty cutting edge in our research there.

So we are definitely driving that direction. We obviously are thinking about applications in robotics. We'll kind of work seriously. We are partnering with a few companies today, but it's an area I would say stay tuned. We are yet to fully articulate our plans outside. But it's an area we are definitely committed to driving a lot of progress. But I think AI ends up driving that massive progress in robotics. The field has been held back for a while. I mean, the hardware has made extraordinary progress. The software had been the challenge, but with AI now and the generalized models we are building, You know, we are building these models, getting them to work in the real world in a safe way, in a generalized way, is the frontier we're pushing pretty hard on.

Well, it's really nice to see the models and the different teams integrated to where all of them are pushing towards one world model that's being built. So from all these different angles, multimodal, you're ultimately trying to get Gemini. The same thing that would make AI mode really effective in answering your questions, which requires a kind of world model, is the same kind of thing that would help a robot be useful in the physical world. So everything is aligned. That is what makes this moment so unique because running a company, for the first time, you can do one investment in a very deep, horizontal way.

On top of it, you can drive multiple businesses forward, right? And that's effectively what we are doing in Google and Alphabet. Yeah, it's all coming together like it was planned ahead of time, but it's not, of course. It's all distributed. I mean, if Gmail and Sheets and all these other incredible services, I can sing Gmail praises for years. I mean, it's just revolutionized email. But the moment you start to integrate AI, Gemini, into Gmail, I mean, that's the other thing. Speaking of productivity multiplier, people complain about email, but that changed everything. Email, like the invention of email changed everything.

And it's been ripe. There's been a few folks trying to revolutionize email, some of them on top of Gmail, but that's like ripe for innovation, not just spam filtering, but you demoed a really nice demo of personalized responses. And at first I was like, at first I felt really bad about that. But then I realized that there's nothing wrong to feel bad about. Because the example you gave is when a friend asks, you know, you went to whatever hiking location, do you have any advice? And they just search us through all your information to give them good advice. And then you put the cherry on top, maybe some love or whatever, camaraderie.

But the informational aspect, the knowledge transfer does for you. I think there'll be important moments. Like it should be like today, if you write a card in your own handwriting and send it to someone, that's a special thing. Similarly, there'll be a time to your friends. Maybe a friend wrote and said he's not doing well or something. You know, those are moments you want to save your times for writing something, reaching out. But, you know, like saying, give me all the details of the trip you took, you know, to me makes a lot of sense for an AI assistant to help you, right? And so I think both are important, but I think I'm excited about that direction.

Yeah, I think ultimately it gives more time for us humans to do the things we humans find meaningful. And I think it scares a lot of people because we're going to have to ask ourselves the hard question of like, what do we find meaningful? And I'm sure there's answers. I mean, it's the old question of the meaning of existence is you have to try. try to figure that out. That might be ultimately parenting or being creative in some domains of art or writing. And it challenges to, you know, it's a good question to ask yourself, like, in my life, what is the thing that brings me most joy and fulfillment? And if I'm able to actually focus more time on that, that's really powerful. I think that's the, you know, that's

I do. If you have a passion for computer science, I would. Computer science is obviously a lot more than programming alone. So I would. I still don't think I would change what you pursue. I think AI will horizontally allow impact every field. It's pretty tough to predict in what ways.

so any education in which you're learning good first principles thinking i think it's good education you've revolutionized web browsing you've revolutionized a lot of things over the

like somebody commented on a top comment on one of the demos of Beam. They said this will either be killed off in five weeks or revolutionize all meetings in five years.

And there's very much, Google tries so many things and sometimes sadly kills off very promising projects because there's so many other things to focus on. I use so many Google products. Google Voice I still use. I'm so glad that's not being killed off. That's still alive. Thank you, whoever's defending that because it's awesome. And it's great that you keep innovating. I just want to list off just as a big thank you. So search, obviously, Google revolutionized. chrome and all of these could be multi-hour conversations gmail have been singing gmail praises forever maps incredible technological innovation and revolutionizing mapping android like we talked about youtube like we talked about adsense uh google translate for the academic mind a google scholar is incredible when with the book and also the scanning of the books so making all all the world's knowledge accessible, even when that knowledge is a kind of niche thing, which Google Scholar is.

And then obviously with DeepMind, with AlphaZero, AlphaFold, AlphaEvolve. i could talk forever about alpha evolve that's mind-blowing all of that released and as part of that uh set of things you've released in this year when uh those brilliant articles were written about google is done uh and uh like we talked about pioneering self-driving cars and quantum computing which could be another thing that is low-key is scuba diving its way to changing the world forever uh so another potheads slash um micro kitchen question if you build agi what kind of question would you ask it what would you what would you want to talk about definitively google has created agi that can basically answer any question what topic are you going to? Where are you going? It's a great question. Maybe it's proactive by then and should tell me a few things I should know. But I think if I were to ask it, I think it'll help us understand ourselves much better in a way that will surprise us, I think. And so maybe that's, you already see people do it with the products and so but you know in an agi context i think that'll be pretty powerful at a personal level or a general human nature at a personal level like you're talking to agi yeah i think i think you know uh there is some chance it'll it'll kind

of understand you you know in a very deep way uh i think uh you know in a profound way that's a possibility. I think there is also the obvious thing of maybe it helps us understand the universe better in a way that expands the frontiers of our understanding of the world. That is something super exciting. But look, I really don't know. I think I haven't had access to something that powerful yet, but I think those are all possibilities. I think on the personal level, asking questions about yourself could, a sequence of questions like that about what makes me happy, I think we'd be very surprised to learn that those kind of the, a sequence of questions and answers, we might explore some profound truths in the way that sometimes art reveals to us, great books reveal to us, great conversations with loved ones reveal.

things that are obvious in retrospect, but are nice when they're said. But for me, number one question is about how many alien civilizations are there. 100%. That's going to be your first question. Number one, how many living and dead alien civilizations, maybe a bunch of follow-ups, like how close are they? Are they dangerous? If there's no alien civilizations, why? Or if there's no advanced alien civilizations, but bacteria like life everywhere, why? What is the barrier preventing you from getting to that? Is it because that when you get sufficiently intelligent, you end up destroying ourselves because you need competition in order to develop an advanced civilization?

And when you have competition, it's going to lead to military conflict and conflict eventually kills everybody. I don't know, I'm going to have that kind of discussion. Get an answer to the Fermi paradox, yeah. Exactly, and have a real discussion about it. I'm not sure, I'm realizing now with your answer is a more productive answer because I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that information, but maybe it speaks to the general human curiosity that Liz talked about, that we're all just really curious and making the world's information accessible allows our curiosity to be satiated some with AI even more.

We can be more and more curious and learn more about the world, about ourselves. And in so doing, I always wonder if, I don't know if you can comment on. Is it possible to measure the, not the GDP productivity increase like we talked about, but maybe whatever that increases, the breadth and depth of human knowledge that Google has unlocked with Google search and now with AI mode, with Gemini, is a difficult thing to measure. Many years ago, there was a, I think it was an MIT study. They just estimated the impact of Google search. And they basically said it's the equivalent to on a per person basis.

It's a few thousands of dollars per year per person, right? Like it's the value that got created per year, right? And, but it's, yeah, it's tough to capture these things, right? You kind of take it for granted as these things come. and the frontier keeps moving. But, you know, how do you measure the value of something like alpha fold over time, right? And so on. And also the increase in quality of life when you learn more. I have to say, like, with some of the programming I do done by AI, for some reason, I'm more excited to program. And so the same with knowledge, with discovering things about the world, it makes you more excited to be alive.

it makes you more curious, and it keeps, the more curious you are, the more exciting it is to live and experience the world. And it's very hard to, I don't know if that makes you more productive, probably not nearly as much as it makes you happy to be alive. And that's a hard thing to measure, the quality of life increases some of these things do. As AI continues to get better and better at everything that humans do, what do you think is the biggest thing that makes us humans special? Look, I think the essence of humanity, there's something about the consciousness we have, what makes us uniquely human.

Maybe the lines will blur over time and it's tough to articulate. But I hope, hopefully, we live in a world where if you make resources more plentiful and make the world lesser of a zero-sum game over time, which it's not, but in a resource-constrained environment, people perceive it to be. And so I hope the values of what makes us uniquely human, empathy, kindness, all that, surfaces more as the aspirational hope I have. Yeah, it multiplies the compassion, but also the curiosity. Just the banter, the debates we'll have about the meaning of it all. And I also think in the scientific domains, all the incredible work that DeepMind is doing, I think we'll still continue to play, to explore scientific questions, mathematical questions, physics questions, even as AI gets better and better at helping us solve some of the questions.

Sometimes the question itself is a really difficult thing. both the right new questions to ask and the answers to them and the self-discovery process, which it will drive, I think. You know, our early work with both co-scientists and Alpha Evolve, just super exciting to see. What gives you hope about the future of human civilization? I've always, I'm an optimist and, you know, I look at, now if you were to say you take the journey of human civilization it's been you know we've relentlessly made the world better right in many ways at any given moment in time there are big issues to work through. It may look, but, you know, I always ask myself the question, would you have been born now or any other time in the past? I most often, not most often, almost always would rather be born now, right? And so that's the extraordinary thing the human civilization has accomplished, right? And like, you know, and we've kind of constantly made the world a better place. And so something tells me, as humanity, we always rise collectively to drive that frontier forward. So I expect it to be no different in the future.

I agree with you totally. I'm truly grateful to be alive in this moment. And I'm also really excited for the future. And the work you and the incredible teams here are doing is one of the big reasons I'm excited for the future. So thank you. Thank you for all the cool products you've built. and please don't kill Google Voice. Thank you, Sundar. We won't, yeah. Thank you for talking today. This was incredible. Thank you. Real pleasure. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sundar Pichai. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexfriedman.com slash sponsors.

Shortly before this conversation, I got a chance to get a couple of demos that frankly blew my mind. The engineering was really impressive. The first demo was Google Beam, and the second demo was the XR glasses. And some of it was caught on video, so I thought I would include here some of those video clips. Hey, Lex. My name's Andrew. I lead the Google Beam team, and we're going to be excited to show you a demo. We're going to show you, I think, a glimpse of something new. So that's the idea, a way to connect, a way to feel present from anywhere with anybody you care about. here's google beam this is a development platform that we've built so there's a prototype here of google beam there's one right down the hallway i'm going to go down and turn that on in a second we're going to experience it together we'll be back in the same room wonderful whoa okay here we are all right this is real already wow this is real good to see you this is google beam we're trying to make it feel like you and i could be anywhere in the world but when these magic windows open we're back together i see you exactly the same way you see me it's almost like we're sitting at the table sharing a table together i could learn from you talk to you share

a meal with you get to know you so you could feel the depth of this yeah wow so for people probably can't even imagine what this looks like there's a there's a 3d version it looks real you look real it looks real to you it looks like you're coming out of the screen We quickly believe, once we're in beam, that we're just together. You settle into it, you're naturally attuned to seeing the world like this, and you just get used to seeing people this way. But literally, from anywhere in the world with these magic screens. This is incredible. It's a neat technology. Wow. So I saw demos of this, but they don't come close to the experience of this.

I think one of the top YouTube comments on one of the demos I saw was like, why would I want a high-definition? I'm trying to turn off the camera. but this actually is this feels like the camera has been turned off and we're just in the same room together this is really compelling that's right i i know it's kind of late in the day too so i brought you a snack just in case you're a little bit hungry but um so what can you push it farther and it just becomes let's try to float it between rooms you know it kind of fades it from my room and then and then you see my hand the depth of my hand of course yeah of course yeah it feels like you um try this try give me a high five and there's almost a sensation of feeling touch yeah almost feel yes because you're so attuned to you know that should be a high five it feeling like you could connect with somebody that way so it's kind of a magical experience oh this is really nice how much does it cost we've got a lot of companies testing it we just announced that we're going to be bringing it to offices soon as a set of products we've got some companies He's helping us build these screens, but eventually I think this will be in almost every screen.

There's nothing. I'm not wearing anything. Well, I'm wearing a suit and tie to clarify. I am wearing clothes. This is not a CGI. But outside of that, cool. And the audio is really good. And you see me in the same three-dimensional way. Yeah, the audio is spatialized. So if I'm talking from here, of course it sounds like I'm talking from here. You know, if I move to the other side of the room. Wow. So these little subtle cues, these really matter to bring people together all the non-verbals all the emotion the things that are lost today here it is we put it back into the system you pulled this off holy shit they pulled it off and integrated into this i saw the translation also right this is yeah we've got a bunch of things let me show you a couple kind of cool things let's do a little bit of work together maybe we could um critique one of your latest uh so you know it's you and i work together so of course we're in the same room but with this superpower, I can bring other things in here with me. And it's nice. You know, it's like we could sit together, we could watch something, we could work. We've shared meals as a team together in this system. But once you do the presence aspect of this, you want to bring some

other superpowers to it. And so you could review code together. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I've got some slides I'm working on. You know, maybe you could help me with this. Keep your eyes on me for a second. I'll slide back into the center. I didn't really move, but the system just kind of puts us the right spot and knows where we need so you just turn to your laptop the system moves you and then it does the overlay automatically it kind of morphs the room to put things in the spot that they need to be in everything has a place in the room everything has a sense of presence or spatial consistency and that kind of makes it feel like we're together with us another thing i should also say you're not just three-dimensional it feels like you're leaning like out of the screen You're like coming out of the screen.

You're not just in that world three-dimensional. Yeah, exactly. Holy crap. Move back to center. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Let me tell you how this works. You probably already have the premise of it, but there's two things, two really hard things that we put together. One is an AI video model. So there's a set of cameras. You asked kind of about those earlier. There's six color cameras, just like webcams that we have today, taking video streams and feeding them into our AI model and turning that into a 3D video of you and I. It's effectively a light field. So it's kind of an interactive 3D video that you can see from any perspective.

That's transmitted over to the second thing, and that's a light field display. And it's happening bidirectionally. I see you and you see me both in our light field displays. These are effectively flat televisions or flat displays, but they have the sense of dimensionality, depth, size is correct. You can see shadows and lighting are correct. and everything's correct from your vantage point. So if you move around ever so slightly, and I hold still, you see a different perspective here. You see kind of things that were occluded become revealed. You see shadows, you know, move in the way they should move.

All of that's computed and generated using our AI video model for you. It's based on your eye position. Where does the right scene need to be placed in this light field display for you just to feel present? It's real time, no latency. I'm not seeing, you weren't freezing up at all. No, no, I hope not. I think it's you and I together, real time. That's what you need for real communication. And at a quality level, it is realistic. Is it possible to do three people? Is that going to move that way also? Yeah, let me kind of show you. So if she enters the room with us, you can see her, you can see me.

And if we had more people, you eventually lose a sense of presence. You kind of shrink people down. You lose a sense of scale. So think of it as the window fits a certain number of people. if you want to fit a big group of people you want you know the boardroom or the big room you need like a much wider window um if you want to see you know just grandma and the kids you can do smaller windows so everybody has a seat at the table or everybody has a sense of where they belong and there's kind of a sense of presence that's obeyed if you have to many people you kind of go back to like 2d metaphors that we're used to people in tiles placed anywhere for the image i'm seeing did you have to get scanned i mean i see you without being scanned so it's just so much easier if you don't have to wear anything you don't have to pre-scan you just do it the way it's supposed to happen without anybody having to learn anything or put anything on i thought you had to solve the the scanning problem but here you don't it's just cameras it's just vision it's video yeah we're not trying to kind of make an approximation of you because everything you do every day matters you know i cut myself shaving i put on a pin

all the little kind of you know aspects of you those just happen um we don't have the time to scan or kind of capture those or dress avatars we we kind of appear as we appear and so all that's transmitted truthfully that's happening chris how you doing good to meet you nice to meet you so um as max mentioned i had glasses here we start with um the foundation of great glasses something stylish lightweight wearable let me say how can we build great technology and experiences on top of that one of the core tenets of the Android XR platform this idea of a multimodal conversational device see what you see what you hear so we've got a camera you've got speakers multiple microphones for speaker isolation I'll give you a chance to try these yourself yeah sorry we'll put up there whoa yeah so the first thing you see it's a super simple straightforward forward home screen. So you probably see the time, the weather, calendar appointments there. This is designed to be sort of your one-stop shop for quick glanceable information throughout the day.

We want to do something that's easy to, you know, get what you need and then go back to what you're doing. So you can imagine, you know, turning on the display, getting that quick glance, and then continuing on your way. You can be fully conversational at this point. You can ask questions, for example, about the paintings. You can interrupt. You can ask follow-up questions. And as I mentioned before, if you want to at any time pause, you just tap there on the right. Gemini, how much does this painting cost? The painting is called The Bridge of Leif-A-Leif, 1875, by Armand Guillaumet. It appears to be a print, and it would be impossible to know its cost without finding the seller.

Okay, so this is fake. I understand. Why do humans pay so much money for paintings? People pay a lot for paintings because of their artistic merit, the artist's famous and seasoned rarity, and for the appreciation you learn. So, a few more things I want to show you, just for the sake of time. you go ahead and long press on the side again to just look Gemini there there you go um did you catch Google I over last week by any chance so you might have seen on stage the Google Maps experience very briefly I want to give you a chance to get a sense of what that feels like today you can imagine you're walking down the street if you look up like you're walking straight ahead you get quick turn-by-turn directions so you have a sense of what the next turn is like nice in your phone in your pocket oh that's so intuitive sometimes you need that quick sense of Which way is the right way?

Yeah, sometimes. So let's say you're coming out of a subway, getting out of a cab, you can just glance down at your feet. We have it set up to translate from Russian to English. I think I get to wear the glasses and you speak to me if you don't mind. I can speak Russian. Привет, друг, как у тебя дела? I'm doing well, how are you doing? Attempted to swear, tempted to say inappropriate things. I see it transcribed in real time. And so obviously, you know, based on the different languages and the sequence of subjects and verbs, there's a slight delay sometimes, but it's really just like subtitles for the real world.

Thank you for this. All right, back to me. Hopefully watching videos of me having my mind blown like the apes in 2001 Space Odyssey playing with a monolith was somewhat interesting. Like I said, I was very impressed. And now I thought, if it's okay, I could make a few additional comments about the episode and just in general. In this conversation with Sundar Pichai, I discussed the concept of the Neolithic package, which is the set of innovations that came along with the first agriculture. revolution about 12,000 years ago, which included the formation of social hierarchies, the early primitive forms of government, labor specialization, domestication of plants and animals, early forms of trade, large-scale cooperations of humans, like that required to build, yes, the pyramids and temples, like Gobekli Tepe. I think this may be the right way to actually talk about the inventions that changed human history, not just as a single invention, but as a kind of network of innovations and transformations that came along with it.

And the productivity multiplier framework that I mentioned in the episode, I think is a nice way to try to concretize the impact of each of these inventions under consideration. And we have to remember that each node in the network of the sort of fast follow-on inventions is in itself a productivity multiplier. Some are additive, some are multiplicative. So in some sense, the size of the network in the package is the thing that matters when you're trying to rank the impact of inventions on human history. The easy picks for the period of biggest transformation at least in sort of modern day discourse is the industrial revolution or even in the 20th century, the computer or the internet.

I think it's because it's easiest to intuit for modern day humans, the impact, the exponential impact of those technologies. But recently, I suppose this changes week to week, but I have been doing a lot of reading on ancient human history. So recently, my pick for the number one invention would have to be the first agricultural revolution, the Neolithic package that led to the formation of human civilizations. That's what enabled the scaling of the collective intelligence machine of humanity, and for us to become the early bootloader for the next 10,000 years of technological progress, which, yes, includes AI, and the tech that builds on top of AI.

And of course, it could be argued that the word invention doesn't properly apply to the agricultural revolution. I think actually Yuval Noah Harari argues that it wasn't the humans who were the inventors, but a handful of plant species, namely wheat, rice, and potatoes. This is strictly a fair perspective, but I'm having fun, like I said, with this discussion. Here, I just think of the entire Earth as a system that continuously transforms. And I'm using the term invention in that context, asking the question of when was the biggest leap on the log scale plot of human progress? Will AI, AGI, ASI eventually take the number one spot in this ranking?

I think it has a very good chance to do so, due, again, to the size of the network of inventions that will come along with it. I think we discuss in this podcast the kind of things that would be included in the so-called AI package, but I think there's a lot more possibilities, including discussed in previous podcasts, in many previous podcasts, including with Dari Amadei, talking on the biological innovation side, the science progress side. In this podcast, I think we talk about something that I'm particularly excited about in the near term, which is unlocking the cognitive capacity of the entire landscape of brains that is the human species, making it more accessible through education and through machine translation, making information, knowledge, and the rapid...

learning, and innovation process accessible to more humans, to the entire 8 billion, if you will. So I do think language or machine translation applied to all the different methods that we use on the internet to discover knowledge is a big unlock. But there are a lot of other stuff in the so-called AI package, like discussed with Dario curing all major human diseases. is he really focuses on that in the Machines of Love and Grace essay. I think there will be huge leaps in productivity for human programmers and semi-autonomous human programmers. So humans in the loop, but most of the programming is done by AI agents.

And then moving that towards a superhuman AI researcher that's doing the research that develops and programs the AI system in itself. I think there'll be huge transformative effects from autonomous vehicles. These are the things that we maybe don't immediately understand or understand from an economics perspective, but there will be a point when AI systems are able to interpret, understand, interact with the human world to a sufficient degree to where many of the manually controlled human-in-the-loop systems we rely on become fully autonomous. And I think mobility is such a big part of human civilization that there will be effects on that, that they're not just economic, but are social, cultural, and so on. And there's a lot more things I could talk about for a long time. So obviously the integration, utilization of AI in the creation of art, film, music. I think the digitalization and automating basic functions of government and then integrating AI into that process, thereby decreasing corruption and costs and increasing transparency and efficiency. I think we as humans, individual humans, will continue to transition further and further into cyborgs. So there's already an AI in the loop of the human condition,

and that will become increasingly so as the AI becomes more powerful. The thing I'm obviously really excited about is major breakthroughs in science and not just on the medical front, but on physics, fundamental physics, which would then lead to energy breakthroughs, increasing the chance that we become, we actually become a Kardashev Type 1 civilization and then enabling us in so doing to do interstellar exploration of space and colonization of space. I think they're also, in the near term, much like with the Industrial Revolution that led to rapid specialization of skills, of expertise, there might be a great sort of despecialization.

So as the AI system become superhuman experts of particular fields, there might be greater and greater value to being the integrator. of AIs, for humans to be sort of generalists. And so the great value of the human mind will come from the generalists, not the specialists. That's a real possibility that that changes the way we are about the world. We wanna know a little bit of a lot of things and move about the world in that way. That could have, when passing a certain threshold, a complete shift in who we are as a collective intelligence, as a human species. Also, as an aside, when thinking about the invention that was the greatest in human history, again, for a bit of fun, we have to remember that all of them build on top of each other.

And so we need to look at the delta, the step change on the, I would say, impossibly to perfectly measure plot of... exponential human progress. Really, we can go back to the entire history of life on Earth, and a previous podcast guest, Nick Lane, does a great job of this in his book, Life Ascending, listing these 10 major inventions throughout the evolution of life on Earth, like DNA, photosynthesis, complex cells, sex, movement, sight, all those kinds of things. I forget the full list that's on there, but I think that's so far from the human experience that my intuition about, let's say, productivity multipliers of those particular inventions completely breaks down, and a different framework is needed to understand the impact of these inventions of evolution. The origin of life on Earth, or even the Big Bang itself, of course, is the OG invention that set the stage for all the rest of it.

and there are probably many more turtles under that which are yet to be discovered. So anyway, we live in interesting times, fellow humans. I do believe the set of positive trajectories for humanity outnumber the set of negative trajectories, but not by much. So let's not mess this up. And now let me leave you with some words from French philosopher Jean de la Bruyère Out of difficulties grow miracles Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time