Sundar Pichai on A.I. Backlash, the Future of Work and Google’s Next Era

Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Well, that brings back memories. It feels like eons ago. Those three years feel like a long time ago now. But I think it's staggering to see how much the technology is making progress. We've made progress as a company. And I think it's a very dynamic moment in the industry. I think our models are at the frontier in some areas, and there are areas where we are behind the frontier, so it's a combination. If you look at overall capabilities including text, multimodality, voice, audio, reasoning in general, overall intelligence, I think we're very capable. When it comes to agentic coding with tool use, instruction following, long horizon tasks, I think we are a bit behind at this moment. But we are hard at work. The space is so dynamic. All of the leading labs have their own pre-training cycles, so you have these cadences and they may not exactly match up. The moment is intense enough that if you're slightly off, 3 months ago people are like we are ahead and no one could catch up with us, and then now the conversation flips. But that's part of the territory of being at the frontier. I think we are the only large company which is actually at that frontier. So one way to think about it is there are a couple of startups which have made extraordinary progress, and we've been deeply working on this for a long time. I think we took a big step forward with 3.5 Flash. It does address some of the areas we've been behind. Obviously getting it out in the real world and iterating with that data coming back is going to really help us. I think coding was the area where getting access to the data flows was important. I think we maybe quite didn't have the surface like Plote Code as an example or what Anthropic maybe had with Cursor too. And so getting anti-gravity with 2.0 to, we've been using it internally at Google for a while. I shared the token usage at Google IO. I've never seen anything like it internally. We are doubling every week and people are really putting the models to work, and so that is helping us hill climb quite a bit. But the frontier is very dynamic, but I'm very optimistic and confident we'll push through there.

Look, I think coding ends up being very foundational in everything we do. So I think it's an important frontier to be on. There are areas in coding where we've been very good, like creating single-shot web front ends. But in terms of this long-running task where serious developers are working on complicated code bases, I think we are making progress. It is just that there is a gap to the frontier where others are, but we are working, we are well aware of it, and making progress there.

I'm looking forward to being done with interviews so I can spend more time with the teams.

No, look, I'm going to meet the teams right after this. I think we are definitely going to take a day or two to settle in. I think it's a new model in a new area where we've made some progress. There could be some regressions, but we will be able to quickly address them through our post-training pretty quickly. I think there are some artifacts and behaviors we are seeing which are easy to address. Given it was a day after us putting out a lot of things, we had tightened usage limits to avoid outages, but you will see us make progress on usage limits very soon. That is rightfully a source of frustration when you encounter it. I feel the same, but those are areas we will address pretty soon and make progress.

I think all of us saw sometime around there was an inflection point in coding, and I think we are all responding to it. I think we all have pretty serious strikes around this area, so I don't see it as an issue. We are a large company and we have scale, so we will be able to focus on a few multiple things at the same time. I don't see it as any fundamental issues as much as we are making progress. We're going to make progress. I think we are in a moment in time in this field where 30 to 60 days look like 5 years. That's all it is.

I think it's important to bring users along the journey as well as making sure the product is working for their expectations. So I try not to get ahead of that. It is very clear as we evolve through these changes, people are responding positively, we can see it in the long-term metrics of the product. So I think we understand that. But people want search to be fast. Through search, people are looking to connect with what's out there on the web, so that's important to us. So I think you're seeing us evolve the product, and I think you'll continue to see it be methodical. We didn't have AI mode a year ago, but now a lot of people are experiencing it. I think we have made it more seamless to go there. But I don't see sources and links going away; they will always be there as part of it.

Well, I think we will, if anything, in the AI mode, in an agent, these things are going to do a lot more for you than what we were able to do for users 10 years ago. I think the economic value is always a function of the total value you're giving users. I think all of us would say over time the value we are providing users increases. There's more competition, and there are more choices. So I feel comfortable between a combination of subscription and ads that the right models will continue to be there. Adam Smith's rules don't change in this new world.

I mean, AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It's progressing at an extraordinary pace. Humans aren't evolved to process that much change. People rightfully are anxious about what the future will bring. So I understand it. It feels natural with such a profound technology shift. We've had far simpler technology shifts where there has been anxiety. This is of a scale unlike anything we've seen before. I think the industry has to do a lot more to continue driving and showing the benefits that are possible with the technology. That is something in our control. We have more work to do to make sure when we are scaling up infrastructure investments, we make that work better. But people's concerns are a bit more fundamental around the shift. A natural part of this is people are anxious about their economic future. There is a lot of conversation about jobs radically changing and some going away. I happen to think the outlook is better than some of those dire predictions. But as a society, if you're hearing it, it's natural. I would be surprised if people aren't more anxious. It's important because the change is happening so fast. In democracies, you need citizens to be engaged and aware, and make their preferences known. That's what causes action in society. So I think there's something healthy about this dialogue. Given the pace, it seems right to me both the concerns and the fact that we need to take it seriously.

Anytime we have driven technology progress, it helps drive progress in the world. These graduates are going to be a big part of driving that progress and also dealing with the impact of that technology. So we have to be very mindful of that. I've always been extraordinarily optimistic about the next generation. We all have this view that we are anxious and worry about the next generation, but the next generation rises to the challenge and builds a better world. I view it as no different from those moments. My goal would be to share my experiences with them. That's what I'm looking to do.

At a basic level, I do think there is a new level of capability all of us are going to have. When spreadsheets rolled out, you know, I don't know how people did financial analysis before that. Spreadsheets changed the starting point for many people. Even coding: if you fast forward the progress we are seeing there, so many more people are going to be able to code. I think those are the new serendipitous ways this will work out that we underestimate. People are going to be more productive. They will have more time for leisure. There are so many areas where today people's work involves a lot of drudgery. Doctors have high burnout rates because they spend less time with patients due to paperwork. AI will help them do more of what they are called to do. The radiologist analogy has been fascinating. I look at myself: I've gotten a lot more scans than my dad ever did, and each scan has 10x the information. That number is going to be 10x in 10 years. So you are actually going to need AI to keep up with that demand. So I think it's nonlinear how the impact will be. I don't want to minimize that every technology shift brings disruption, and we as a society need to be super serious about it and engage. But there are many positive dimensions which are maybe not being talked about, and there are overly deterministic dire scenarios which I quite don't agree with.

I've used it a lot more in my professional context because it was mainly available in my corp account. In that context, I've used it to prepare for any meeting. I wish I had brought the prompt and output for Hard Fork. I just as a test case used it for Hard Fork. It has some things about the two of you, so I don't think I can project it.

Partially kidding. But I have had it in my personal account more recently. So again, here's a simple task I did. I just asked it to look ahead at my meetings and color code it in categories so that I can keep sense of how I'm spending my time. I think it's extraordinary to watch. It came back with suggestions of two color coding schemes and I just had to choose one. It's actually sci-fi; it changes the color in the calendar: personal meetings, health related meetings, time I'm spending at work. That's an example of a personal query I just did to see what's happening. But with agents, I think you have to give people a sense of trust. I think about this as what allowed us to get someone to sit in the back seat of a self-driving car. We did it in steps. There's an element of that where if something unexpected happens, people will back off. So part of it is earning their trust, giving them a sense of control and transparency, but more importantly from a security standpoint, these systems can be hacked, so we want to make sure we are not ahead of the frontier in a wrong way.

Look, we'll have to wait and see the details of the full executive order, but they've been engaging with the industry in a very robust way. I think the approach really balances innovation and oversight. We'll have to wait for the details to come out. But there are a few areas where we will need more cross-industry government coordination. It makes sense to me: cyber is a great example. If you have found an exploit which could impact a governmental agency, the government needs to be prepared for it. So there is validity. But doing it in a way that doesn't overly slow things down, and the balance may shift as we reach more advanced levels of technology. But to me, this seems like a prudent approach. Part of what we are doing with building SynthID, open sourcing it, and building a consortium together, is an example in a different area. These things only work together if we can come together as an industry. So I'm glad they're approaching it in that way.

You know, these models are getting better at coding and agentic workflows. At some point, you can see in anti-gravity today, in over 12 hours it can build a simple OS from scratch. That is genuinely multiple thousands of hours for somebody to do. So you are seeing some of that in work today. In our products, we have agents and sub-agents and the orchestration of those agents building things together. It's a continuum. We are all making progress, but in the way people describe RSI, I don't think we are there yet. That would represent a next level of acceleration and would have a lot of implications, but we aren't quite there yet.

It's a great example. I think all responsible labs, if you're approaching moments like that, you would be consulting with a much broader conversation than an internal one. We all have to avoid race conditions at those stages of AGI.

I think each is not a constraint on the other. As long as we can make enough chips, it's not a constraint. The right way to think about it is we have GDM and our first party services. You can think about that as company business cash flows, you're planning for that. Then you have Google Cloud, which is a business with revenue cash flows, and you're doing long-term planning for that. If you didn't have cloud and we weren't providing those chips, we wouldn't be planning them anyway. There are a lot of advantages of providing TPUs to others. The fact that researchers at Anthropic are using TPUs allows us to make the best hardware for next generation. Also, we use NVIDIA chips too, and the next generation chips are incredible. When you're running platforms, you have a platform side of the business. I've worked on many platforms like Chrome, Android, Google Cloud. Why would you ever open source or provide technology? It makes sense on its own merits. It allows us to stay at the frontier; economies of scale helps in various ways. So it makes a lot of sense.

Oh, we are, there is inevitable progress towards AGI happening. I've long understood it; otherwise I wouldn't have pivoted the company 10 years ago to put that technology at the center. All I meant by that statement was that even if AGI takes 10 years, the technology 3 years out will be so much more powerful than what we have today that I don't want people to think because AGI is 10 years out you don't need to act or prepare. That is all my statement means.

Well, I absolutely know that the technology is making foundational progress towards AGI. I'm less able to predict with certainty whether it's in the 3 to 5 year timeframe or 5 to 10 year timeframe. The rate of progress over the last 1 to 2 years has made me feel it's on the closer side than not. In your role running one of the largest companies in the world with a responsibility to society, the language I choose to use might be different than other people. But as a company, 10 years ago at IO, I announced TPUs and AI-first data centers. Clearly I understood where this technology was headed.

Look, I've had many conversations with Demis on this topic. I think in this context he's defining singularity as the advent of AGI. I think he had articulated by 2030 or so. If you believe that, it makes sense. That's what he's articulating. Demis, myself, and many others all feel it's important to articulate that if that's what you believe, because we are at the frontier building this technology, and hopefully people are listening. It's important as a society we are internalizing that and getting ready for it.

Thank you, sir.

Appreciate it. Take care.