How Sundar Pichai is rethinking Google for the AI era | Decoder

I think we've done it at IAO now almost five times. Wow. I quite didn't realize it's been five times, but I enjoy it. Thanks again. Yeah. I want to start with a little bit of a lightning round. I was thinking about this. We've talked a lot. We always get deep into the weeds of the web and search and big, heady ideas. And I realize I have not asked you the decoder questions in quite some time. And just looking back at our previous conversations and Google itself, you've made quite a lot of changes to Google. I think a number of your direct reports have changed over time. You've obviously restructured DeepMind, platforms and devices, and Android has been restructured itself.

Tell me how Google is structured right now. OK, it is Google and Alphabet. You know, obviously, we have Alphabet as well. But broadly, I think about it as there are three main businesses in Google, Search, YouTube, Google Cloud. There are enormous platforms we run, which is Android, Chrome, and the whole area to do with it. and powering it all is all these important technology areas, which is AI and our infrastructure work. And then you have the functions to go with it. But at a high level, you can think of it as, you know, search, YouTube, Google Cloud, and then our big computing platforms. Those are the main groups.

And obviously powered with Google DeepMind and our infrastructure teams. So that's one simple way to get a mental model around it. And of course, we have other bets beyond that, Waymo being the most prominent of them all. But there are many, many other bets like isomorphic labs and so on. Yeah. I want to stay focused on the Google of it. I feel like we could do an entire hour on Alphabet and how that's structured and how that works as a public company with many bets. But just to stay focused on Google for one second. The knock on Google historically is this is a company that ships lots and lots of products.

You cancel lots of products. There's not tons of focus. There's like thousands of names of different products that are overlapping in kinds of different ways. And where that comes from, at least in my view, is that you do have these big infrastructure bets. You have all these capabilities and the people running the businesses can use those capabilities to spin up products. And there's maybe not a lot of overlap or central planning on like, did we launch two of the same thing? How do you resolve that tension? It does seem like Google has gotten a little more focused, but that is the company's culture, right?

We're going to make a lot of bets and see which ones work. How does that resolve for you? Look, I think there's a lot of intent in what we do too. I think it's not an accident. We have 13 products with a billion users each, and we've been as committed to those products longer term. You can go back and think about when Gmail launched or Maps launched or Google Docs launched or search launched or Chrome launched. And like, you know, so I've been, we've been deep and consistent in many, many areas over a long period of time as well. I do think one way I've internalized in the AI movement is for the first time, we have such a common infrastructure powering all of them with our Gemini models and the underlying AI infrastructure.

So we are more able to intently, you know, with intent, do things which cut across things, right? So personal intelligence is a great example of it. It's one effort. Obviously, users get a choice to turn it on in each of the products. But, you know, it's built with one common infrastructure so that it works consistently across your products. The underlying Gemini models itself is an example. of it. So we are able to bring that model in the context of the products, like ask maps in the context of, you know, the maps product, but a lot of the technology powering it, the voice stack, the model, the intelligence is all one work. So, which is why I think the AI moment offers us a new, really new way to think about it. And not just across Google, across Alphabet too, over time.

I think that's what makes this moment so uniquely powerful is that you can invest so much in R&D and infrastructure and develop a technology, which then you can apply across all these areas. You know, obviously, in a context in which they are useful for users, but the underlying technology platform is common. So there's a lot of intent that way and so on. You have to give room for innovation, otherwise allowing room for innovation where teams on the margin are able to ship some new features. Sometimes you later work to harmonize them. Take Notebook, Notebook LM, and Notebooks are now showing up in Gemini, right?

And it's effectively projects as Notebooks, and you can create a Notebook in Gemini, you can go to Notebook LM, you will see the same Notebooks, vice versa. So that's an example of where you innovate at first, and then you're harmonizing later. Yeah. I was watching the keynote yesterday, and I saw a lot of intent and confidence from Google. We have this core technology. We can express it in lots of ways. It's still essentially Google-y. Like, there's lots of products, lots of Gemini words. I'm going to figure them all out, I promise. I would contrast to, I don't know, three, four years ago when, you know, there was the chat GPT moment.

Everyone worried about what Google would do.

big decisions, some of them uncomfortable as you change people around. How do you make decisions? What's your framework? A big part of my framework is over time understanding that there are very, very few decisions which are really consequential, and most decisions aren't. So what matters much more is that you make the decision, because that's what determines the velocity of an organization.

And so the more you're able to make those decisions and keep the company moving forward, you're generally better off. Of course, there are a few decisions like combining and setting a Google DeepMind. Those are more consequential and you want to take your time deliberating and doing it. But a lot of decision making is about just making them. And so the more you're able to do that, you do develop over time some pattern matching and some intuition for you've seen a version of the problem before, and so I think it's good to rely on that and separate the signal from the noise so that the signal is that this is a really important decision and you want to really deliberate around it versus this is just, you know, it may look big, but it is more a normal

extra dimension to it. The number one question to Coder listeners want me to start asking CEOs, I'll just ask it straightforwardly. How close is Ed to replacing you as the CEO? No, it is today still. I just think the CEO job is not that complicated, right? It is not complicated. There are aspects of it where I think it's going to be very, very helpful in terms of decision making. I joke around that, partially joke around, which is like I have to spend a lot of time allocating compute. And I'm like, well, that seems like the AI is going to make more rational choices over time because I deal with a lot of appeals and emotions as part of working through a process like that.

So I think, look, everywhere what I see, and which is maybe a bit different to how I think, I think done correctly, these tools are going to kind of allow us to operate at the next level in everything we are doing. like you know it's not like you won't do what you were doing before you will start from a higher foundation uh i wasn't there when like i don't know spreadsheets rolled out to companies right and like i almost i have to go think back how did people do all this financial analysis before right and and i'm sure it changed over a period of three to four years fundamentally and we got used to it i think agents etc is a version of it uh it's not like you're not going to plan birthday parties uh it is just that you know what you let's say you're planning a trip somewhere maybe you're actually spending your time thinking about the actual things you want to do with your time versus chasing opening times and how to get tickets and and so on so i think it elevates everything to a different different foundation is how i think about it we have to pause here Welcome back.

I'm talking with Google CEO Sundar Pichai about some of the announcements the company just made at Google I.O.

My intuition there is, oh, that's way more opinionated. There is some chance that's personalized to you may be testing it in a way that you're uniquely personalizing. you are the reason that query might not be exactly representative though i think i think because i know how you review all these things like you know so there is some chance you're in the 0.0001 this is kind of why i'm asking about infinitely personalizable results right and i'm also asking if the experience is good because i i would bet that most people experience ai in google search

I think my argument is that the products do the marketing work and that's my push. I'm still waiting to see the killer app for consumers that does it. I think we have the killer app for enterprise. I want to talk about the web, though, before I burn all of- One point. There are times I've gone through a health journey in Gemini. Yeah. It feels more than a killer app to me. Yeah. better than anything i've ever done before so you know so i think it's you know so people Welcome back I'm talking with Google CEO Sundar Pichai about what Google and AI Search have done and might continue to do to the open web I want to talk about the web the health journey in Gemini that requires a rich data set of health information on the web to exist VO requires i believe you're training gemini and like youtube videos right like vo requires the youtube ecosystem

to get surfaced in search? I mean, this is a much broader topic. I do think, you know, I think both laws and regulations will have to evolve. The courts will have to weigh in. it's important to protect uh copyright it's important to protect fair use and you know and so you know these are constructs which will evolve dynamically uh through that but do you want to be in a bunch of lawsuits with youtube creators you're not lawsuit with publishers in the uk the rhetoric in that lawsuit is getting increasingly heated google has said that the proposed solution is a quote free writer charter every year the news media association sends me a quote to read you and you know they say google calling us free writers is obviously ridiculous Listen, in other words, basic supply chain economics, if the value were really all on Google's side, they would simply allow publishers to opt out.

Do you want to be in that same fight with a bunch of creators on YouTube about opting out? Look, we are constantly, as part of Jim and I, developing. We did offer a new opt-out that Google extended. And we are in conversation. with publishers will take feedback and over times, you know, work through what makes sense and write, you know, obviously it is a, we are not the only player in a big ecosystem. You know, we are also trying to put out products which are competitive to other products out there, right? And I think all the publishers will also write an article saying the product is not very, you know, so it is more complicated than it looks.

I just think you have spent more time thinking about the web and the health of the web and the necessity of the web. Paint me the picture for what a healthy web looks like in the magentic search world. One of the arguments I've made over time, and I actually see it playing around a little bit more, I've started using the web more again over the last year, year and a half. I think all these AI experiences have brought the web back more. There was a time when it felt like, but I always felt the web would be vibrant. In fact, I've argued the web is going to be vibrant every year. And, you know, I would still argue it today. You know, the web is constantly evolving. I've never seen anything as dynamic as the web, which is why it's been such a privilege to be part of that evolution. I look at agents. That is the next evolution of the web, which we will deal with.

And, you know, and I think it will evolve the web pretty profoundly. And there will be a lot of debates about what's okay, what's not. But I think the web will continue to be... People want to put out information, connect with other people. People want to be connected. People aren't trying to be in a siloed world, detached. That doesn't reflect the reality of the human experience. I think the web is going to play as central a role on it as ever before. In fact, the Universal Commerce Protocol, if anything, what we announced yesterday, I think people slightly are underestimating the impact of it.

Can I juxtapose that? There are a lot of muscular announcements about new products, new features, and agentic tools you can use,

You know, I have always answered it this way. I think that timeline doesn't matter because the rate of progress means you're dealing with ever more intelligent systems in a profound way.

So the way I would answer that question, three years from now, whether you and I call it AGI or not doesn't matter because it'll be very, very powerful and we have to prepare for it. Yeah. Sunara, this was great. Thank you so much for letting me tell you again. Thanks, Nila. Pleasure. I'd like to thank Susan Arpachai for taking time to join me on Decoder