The following is a conversation with Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet. And now a quick few second mention of his sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfreeman.com/sponsors. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Tax Network USA for taxes, Better Help for mental health, Element for electrolytes, Shopify for selling stuff online, and AG1 for your daily multivitamin drink. Choose wisely, my friends. And now on to the fullies. You can skip them if you like, but if you do, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will, too. If you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexreeman.com/cont. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Tax Network USA, a full-service tax firm focused on solving tax problems for individuals and for small businesses. I remember when I was preparing for the Roman Empire episode, I came across a lot of places where there was a rigorous discussion about the intricate tax collection algorithms used by the Roman Empire. The reason I use the word algorithms is basically there's a systematic process for determining how much you owe based on your location, based on your status, based on your job, based on all these kinds of factors. It's sad, but those rules in the early days initially give power to the individual because they protect the individual. But when they become too complicated, then the bureaucracy, the centralized power starts to abuse its power by using the rules. And then the individual loses power because they can't figure out the complexity of the rules. And that's essentially why you need the CPAs and the firms to figure out the complexity. Anyway, these guys are good. Talk with one of their strategists for free today. Call 1 800 958 1000 or go to tnusa.com/lex. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P. I got to recently meet a lot of interesting people when I visited San Francisco. I was there in part to celebrate Yoshabach and the newly launched California Institute for Machine Consciousness. I, by the way, encourage you to check it out. I think it's cimc.ai. And there I talked to a lot of brilliant people and one of them was a grad student studying the so-called dark triad. These are the three personality traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. For a brief moment, it made me wish I took that path of studying the human mind. And perhaps that is the indirect way through all the AI, through all the programming, through all the building of systems and now with a podcast. Maybe I somehow sneaked up to that dream in the end. Anyway, I say all that because these topics are studying the extremes of the human mind. But of course, the extremes are just the edges of an incredibly complicated system that's just so fascinating to study, to reflect on, to put a mirror to all those processes that you do through talk therapy. It's just fascinating. Anyway, you can check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole, but there's a lot of interesting studies that measure the decreased performance of the human brain. So, cognitive processing speed, for example, by what amount does it decrease reaction time? But what amount does it decrease when you decrease the brain's sodium levels, for example? Sodium and potassium really are important on a chemical level for the functioning of the human brain. Now obviously all throughout human history people understood the value of water but as a medical concept the concept of dehydration only came about in the 19th century. If we just look at the history of medicine it's kind of hilarious how little we knew before and it makes me think we know very little now relative to what we will know in a hundred and a thousand years. The human body, the biological system of the human body is incredibly complicated. So for us to have the certainty that we sometimes exude about the human body, about what we understand about disease, about health, it's kind of funny. Anyway, get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it. Drink element.com/x. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. Once again, I do this often where I don't just or at all talk about Shopify, but instead talk about the CEO of Shopify, Toby. He once again, like I mentioned with Yoshabach and the newly launched CIMC, California Institute of Machine Consciousness. He's a big supporter of that, too. And a bunch of people have asked me why I have not done a podcast with him yet. I don't know either. I'm sure it's going to happen soon. and I haven't seen him in quite a while. A lot of people from a lot of walks of life deeply respect him for his intellect, for the way he does business, and just for the human being he is. So anyway, not sure why I mentioned that here, but back to what this is supposed to be. You can sell shirts online like I did. lexfridman.com/shop. Super easy to set up a store. I did in a few minutes. What else can I say? You should do it, too. Sign up for $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I was training jiu-jitsu the other day in that wonderful Texas heat and I was reminded first of all how long my journey with jiu-jitsu has been and how fulfilling it has been. How interesting the exploration of the puzzle of two humans trying to break each other's arms and legs plus the wrestling and the grappling component. Really interesting leverage, power, speed, how all that could be neutralized. How to control a human body with leverage with technique as opposed to raw generally misapplied strength I should say. Anyway, because there are times where there's long stretches of weeks where I don't train. You feel it in the cardio. You do a bunch of rounds and you just the breaths are shallow. You feel like the mind is hazy from exhaustion that you're a little bit more risk averse because you don't want to end up in a bad position, have to battle out of that bad position after many rounds of exhausting battles. And after that training session, when I got home, I enjoyed a nice cold AG1. They'll give you a one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexfreeman.com/sponsors. And now, dear friends, here's Sundar Pichai.
Your life story is inspiring to a lot of people. It's inspiring to me. You grew up in India. Whole family living in a humble two-room apartment. Very little, almost no access to technology. And from those humble beginnings, you rose to lead a $2 trillion technology company. So if you could travel back in time and told that, let's say 12-year-old Sundar that you're now leading one of the largest companies in human history, what do you think that young kid would say?
I would have probably laughed it off. Probably too far-fetched to imagine or believe at that time. You would have to explain the internet first.
For sure. I mean computers to me at that time, I was 12 in 1984, so probably by then I started reading about them. I had seen one.
What was that place like? Take me to your childhood.
I grew up in Chennai, in south of India. It's a beautiful bustling city, lots of people, lots of energy. Simple life definitely. Fond memories of playing cricket outside the home. We just used to play on the streets. All the neighborhood kids would come out and we would play till it got dark and we couldn't play anymore, barefoot. Traffic would come. We would just stop the game. Everything would drive through and you would just continue playing. Just to kind of get the visual in your head. Pre-computers, there's a lot of free time. Now I think about it. Now you have to go and seek that quiet solitude or something. Newspapers, books is how I gained access to information at the time. 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. 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 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. 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 5 years, but it's not the only thing.
There was a 5-year waiting list and we got a rotary telephone. But it dramatically changed our lives. People would come to our house to make calls to their loved ones. I would have to go all the way to the hospital to get blood test records and it would take 2 hours to go and they would say, 'Sorry, it's not ready. Come back the next day.' 2 hours to come back. And that became a 5-minute thing. So, as a kid, this light bulb went in my head, this power of technology to change people's lives. We had no running water, 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, we had running water and we had a water heater and you could get hot water to take a shower. For me everything was discrete like that. And so I've always had this firsthand feeling of how technology can dramatically change your life and the opportunity it brings. So that was a subliminal takeaway for me throughout growing up. And I actually observed it and felt it. 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 before that, you only had one TV channel. You couldn't watch movies or something like that. But by the time I was in 12th grade, we got a VCR. It was a Panasonic which we had to go to some shop which had kind of smuggled it in, I guess, and that's where we bought a VCR. But then being able to record a World Cup football game or get video tapes and watch movies. I had these discrete memories growing up and it always left me with the feeling of 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. I go back to India now. The power of mobile, 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, who want to start create companies, build something that has a lot of impact in 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 listen to your heart and see whether you actually enjoy doing it. 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 listening to your heart a bit more than your mind in terms of figuring out what you want to do is one of the best things I would tell people. The second thing is trying to work with people who you feel are better than you. At various points in my life I worked with people who I felt were better than me. You almost are sitting in a room talking to someone and they're like wow, and you want that feeling. Trying to get yourself in a position where you're working with people who you feel are stretching your abilities is what helps you grow. Putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, and often you'll surprise yourself. So being open-minded enough to put yourself in those positions is maybe another thing I would say.
What 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 of leadership, they're in a cutthroat world, they're usually going to be a bit of an asshole. 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 in the context of work and everything. But a few things. Over time I figured out the best way to get the most out of people. You find mission-oriented people who are on the same journey, who have this inner drive to excellence, and you motivate people and you can achieve a lot that way. But have there been times I lose it? Yeah, but maybe less often than others, and over the years less and less so because I find it's not needed to achieve what you need to do.
So losing your temper has not been productive.
Yeah. Less often than not I think people respond to that. They may do stuff to react to that, but you actually want them to do the right thing. There's a bit of sports, you know, football coaches, people talk about man management. Great coaches do that. I think there is an element of that in our lives. How do you get the best out of the people you work with? 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. So you treat them differently. Occasionally there are people who you need to clearly let them know that wasn't okay. 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, people can sometimes see that you're unhappy without you saying it. And so sometimes the silence can deliver that message even more.
Who's the greatest soccer player of all time, Messi or Ronaldo or Pele or Maradona?
I'm going to make a political answer in this question.
Is this going to be a political answer?
No, no. I will tell the truthful answer. It's been interesting because my son is a big Cristiano Ronaldo fan, and so we've had to watch El Clasico together with that dynamic. I so admire CR7. I've never seen an athlete more committed to that kind of excellence. And so, he's one of the all-time greats, but for me, Messi is it.
Yeah. When I see Lionel Messi, you just are in awe that humans are able to achieve that level of greatness and genius and artistry. When we talk about AI, maybe robotics, 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. And just the timing, the movement, it's just genius.
I had the chance to see him a couple weeks ago. He played in San Jose against the Quakes. So I went to see the game. 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'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, it might have been 2017 or 2018, I said at the time that 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 you asked this question I was thinking, do we have a recency bias? In sports it's very tempting to call the current person you're seeing the greatest player. And so is there a recency bias? From first principles I would argue AI will be bigger than all of those. I didn't live through those moments. 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. So, we don't know what it is to have lived through those times. Many of what you're talking about were general things which pretty much affected everything, electricity or internet, etc. But I don't think we have 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 thing is it's recursively self-improving. It's capable of that. The fact it is the first technology that will dramatically accelerate creation itself, creating things, building new things can improve and achieve things on its own, I think puts it in a 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 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 AlphaGo or whatever it is.
Yeah, you're right. When it can do novel self-directed research, obviously for a long time, we'll hopefully always have humans in the loop and all that stuff and these are complex questions to talk about. But yes, I think the underlying technology, I've said this, if you watched seeing AlphaGo start from scratch, be clueless and become better through the course of a day, it really hits you when you see that happen. Even our Veo 3 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 inspiring, a little bit unsettling, 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 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 kinds 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 like pottery, it can store liquids and food, to something we kind of take for granted but social hierarchies and political hierarchy. So like early government was formed because it turns out if humans stop moving and have some surplus food they start coming up with interesting systems. Then trade emerges which turns out to be a really profound thing. There's just second and third order effects from that package and it's 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 the one thing which we can tangibly start seeing now is obviously with the coding progress you got a sense of it. It's going to be so easy to imagine thoughts in your head translating that into things that exist. That'll be part of the package. It's going to empower almost all of humanity to express themselves. Maybe in the past you could have expressed with words, but you could kind of build things into existence. Maybe not fully today. We are at the early stages of Veo coding. I've been amazed at what people have put out online with Veo 3, but it takes a bit of work. 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, 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 to be shared with others, games down the line, all of that just becomes infinitely more possible.
Well, I think the big thing is that it makes it accessible. It unlocks the cognitive capabilities of the entire 8 billion.
No, I agree. Look, think about 40 years ago, maybe in the US there were five people who could do what you were doing. Go do an interview. But today think about with YouTube and other products, how many more people are doing it? So I think this is what technology does. When the internet created blogs, you heard from so many more people. But with AI I think that number won't be in the few hundreds of thousands, it'll be tens of millions of people, maybe even a billion people, putting out things into the world in a deeper way and I think it'll change the landscape of creativity. It makes a lot of people nervous. For example, whatever Fox, MSNBC, CNN are really nervous about this part. Like you mean this dude in a suit could just do this and use YouTube 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 that's about five to 10 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 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 in a world in which there are two AIs, 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 other like it would be boring for us to watch but Magnus Carlsen and Giri, that game would be much more fascinating to watch. So it's tough to say. 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 etc. But the premium experiences you value might be a version of the human essence wherever it comes through, going back to what we talked earlier about watching Messi dribble the ball. I 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 audiobooks 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, then you look at other humans. But the point is it's going 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 enabled so many creators. There is no doubt in me that we will enable more filmmakers than there have ever been. You're going to empower a lot more people. So I think there's an expansionary aspect of this which is underestimated. I think it'll unleash human creativity in a way that hasn't been seen before. It's tough to internalize. If you brought someone from the 50s or 40s and just put them in front of YouTube, 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 time frame.
Do you think there's a future? How many years out is it that 50% of good content is generated by AI?
I would say we will just fall short of that timeline, right? So I think it'll take a bit longer. It's amazing in the early days of Google DeepMind in 2010, they talked about a 20-year time frame to achieve AGI, which is kind of fascinating to see. But for me, the whole thing seeing what Google Brain did in 2012 and when we acquired DeepMind in 2014, right close to where we're sitting, in 2012 you know Jeff Dean showed the image of when the neural networks could recognize a picture of a cat and identify it. This is the early versions of Brain, right? So we all talked about a couple decades. I don't think we'll quite get there by 2030. So my sense is it's slightly after that. But I would stress it doesn't matter what that definition is, because you will have mind-blowing progress on many dimensions. Maybe AI can create videos. We have to figure out as a society how 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 it 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 will change everything, and that could be the post-training, the inference time innovations. And I think Shad Cenne tweeted that Google is just one great UI from completely winning the AI race, meaning UI is a huge part of it, like how that intelligence... I think Logan Cop project likes to talk about this. Right now it's an LLM, but it becomes like when is it going to become a system where you're talking about shipping systems versus shipping the particular model. Yeah, that matters too. How the system manifests 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 is 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, if you think about it, we've kind of boxed them in that way. But given these models can code, they should be able to write the best interfaces to express their ideas.
That is an incredible idea. So the APIs are already open, so you create a really nice agentic system that continuously 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's 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 over time. So all this is the evolution ahead, right? And so that goes back to where we started the conversation. I think there'll be dramatic evolutions in the years ahead.
Maybe one more kitchen question. 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, I've both been very excited about AI, but I've always felt this is a technology 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 P doom question, look, it's wouldn't surprise you to say that's probably another micro kitchen conversation that pops up once in a while, right? 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 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 P doom is actually high, at some point all of humanity is aligned in making sure that's not the case, and so we'll actually make more progress against it. I think so, the irony is there is a self-modulating aspect there. 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, I think I'm optimistic on the P doom scenarios, but that doesn't mean I think the underlying risk is actually pretty high.
That's really really well put. I mean, as the threat becomes more concrete and real, humans do really come together and get their act 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 they would be less resource constrained, which is often the source of military conflict and tensions. So we also have to load into that what's the P doom without AI, P doom with AI, because it's very possible that AI will be the thing that saves us, saves human civilization 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, it would be good to have AI like a pair helping you, right? So that resonates with me for sure. Yeah.
Quick pause. Bathroom break, you know. Let's do that.
If notebook LM was the same compelling 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.
Can you imagine like the US president and the Chinese president being able to do something like Beam with the live translation working well, so they're both sitting and talking, make progress a bit more.
Yeah, just for people listening, we took a quick bathroom break and now we're talking about the demo I did. We'll probably post it somewhere somehow maybe here. I got a chance to experience Beam and it was hard to describe in words how real it felt with just six cameras. It's incredible. It's one of the toughest products, you can't quite describe it to people even when we show it in slides, you don't know what it is, you have to experience it. On the world leaders front, on politics, geopolitics, there's something really special. Studying World War II and how much could have been saved if Chamberlain met Stalin in person. I sometimes 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 Beam, I felt that same thing and then I'm unable to explain. All I kept doing is what a child does: 'You look real.' I don't know if that makes meetings more productive or so on, but it certainly makes them more... 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 put into words. There's something beautiful about great teams collaborating on a thing that's not captured by the productivity of that team or by whatever on paper. Like 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 somewhat remotely with that same personal touch, I don't know, that's a deeply fulfilling thing. I know a lot of people personally hate meetings because a significant percent of meetings when done poorly don't serve a clear purpose. But that's a meeting problem, not a communication problem. If you can improve the communication for the meetings that are useful, that'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.
Oh, 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 interaction, right? All that I think will end up being very meaningful. Nothing substitutes being in person, but it's not always possible. You could be a soldier deployed, trying to talk to your loved ones. So that's what inspires us.
When you and I hung out last year and took a walk, I remember I don't think we talked about this, but I remember outside of that seeing dozens of articles written by analysts and experts that Sundar Pichai should step down because the perception was that Google was definitively losing the AI race, has lost its magic touch in the rapidly evolving technological landscape. And now a year later, it's crazy. You showed this plot of all the things that were shipped over the past year. It's incredible. And Gemini Pro is winning across many benchmarks and products as we sit here today. So take me through that experience when there's all these articles saying you're the wrong guy to lead Google through this. Google's lost, it's done, it's over, to today where Google's winning again. What were some low points during that time?
Look, I mean, lots to unpack. Obviously, the main bet I made as a CEO was to really make sure the company was approaching everything in an AI-first way, setting ourselves up to develop AGI responsibly, and make sure we're putting out products that embody things that are very useful for people. So look, I knew even through moments like that last year, I had a good sense of what we were building internally. I'd already made many important decisions, bringing together teams of the caliber of Brain and DeepMind and setting up Google DeepMind. There were things like we made the decision to invest in TPUs 10 years ago. So we knew we were scaling up and building big models. Anytime you're in a situation like that, a few aspects. I'm good at tuning out noise, separating signal from noise. Do you scuba dive? No. You know, it's amazing. I'm not good at it, but I've done it a few times. Sometimes you jump in the ocean, it's so choppy, but you go down one foot under, it's the calmest thing in the entire universe. So there's a version of that. Running Google, you may as well be coaching Barcelona or Real Madrid. You have a bad season. So there are aspects to that, but I'm good at tuning out the noise. I do watch out for signals, it's important to separate signal from noise. So there are good people sometimes making good points outside, so you want to listen to it, take that feedback in. But internally, you're making a set of consequential decisions. As leaders, you're making a lot of decisions. Many of them are inconsequential. Over time you learn that most of the decisions you're making on a day-to-day basis don't matter. You have to make them just to keep things moving, but you have to make a few consequential decisions. We had set up the right teams, right leaders. We had world-class researchers. We were training Gemini internally. There are factors which outside people may not have appreciated. I mean, TPUs are amazing, but we had to ramp up TPUs too. That took time, and to scale actually having enough TPUs to get the compute needed. But I could see internally the trajectory we were on, and I was so excited internally about the possibility. To me, this moment felt like one of the biggest opportunities ahead for us as a company. That the opportunity space ahead over the next decade, next 20 years, is bigger than what has happened in the past. And I thought we were set up better than most companies in the world to go realize that vision.
I mean, you had to make some consequential bold decisions like you mentioned the merger of DeepMind and Brain. Maybe it's my perspective just knowing humans. I'm sure there's a lot of egos involved. It's very difficult to merge teams and I'm sure there are some hard decisions to be made. Can you take me through your process of how you think through that? Do you go to pull the trigger and make that decision? Maybe what were some painful points? How do you navigate those turbulent waters?
Look, we were fortunate to have two world-class teams. But you're right, it's like somebody coming and telling you, take Stanford and MIT, and then put them together and create a great department. Easier said than done. But we were fortunate, phenomenal teams both had their strengths. They were run very differently. Brain was kind of a lot of diverse projects, bottoms up, and out of it came a lot of important research breakthroughs. DeepMind at the time had a strong vision of how you want to build AGI, so they were pursuing their direction. But I think through those moments, luckily tapping into Jeff, who had expressed a desire to go back to more of a scientific individual contributor roots. He felt management was taking up too much of his time. And Demis naturally was running DeepMind and was a natural choice there. But I think it took us a while to bring the teams together. Credit to Demis, Jeff, Kai, all the great people there. They worked super hard to combine the best of both worlds when you set up that team. A few sleepless nights here and there as we put that thing together. We were patient in how we did it so that it works well for the long term. And some of that in that moment, yes, with things moving fast, I think you definitely felt the pressure, but I think we pulled off that transition well. And I think they've obviously been doing incredible work and there's a lot more incredible things ahead coming from them.
Like we talked about, you have a very calm, even-tempered, respectful demeanor during that time, whether it's the merger or just dealing with the noise. Were there times where frustration boiled over? Like did you have to go a bit more intense on everybody than you usually would?
Probably. You know, probably right. I think in the sense that it was a moment where we were all driving hard. But when you're in the trenches working with passion, you're going to have days. You disagree, you argue, but all that is just part of the course of working intensely. At the end of the day, all of us are doing what we're doing because of the impact it can have, we're motivated by it. For many of us, this has been a long-term journey, and so it's been super exciting. The positive moments far outweigh the stressful moments. Just early this year, I had a chance to celebrate back-to-back over two days, the Nobel Prize for Jeff Hinton and the next day a Nobel Prize for Demis and John Jumper. You worked with people like that. All that is super inspiring.
Is there something like with you where you had to put your foot down, maybe with less versus more, where like 'I'm the CEO and we're doing this'?
