#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet

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?

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.

A telephone.

[laughter]

To have that convenience of going and opening a tap and have hot water come out. Yeah.

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?

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?

So losing your temper has not been productive.

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?

Is this going to be a political answer?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

Well, I think the big thing is that it makes it accessible. It unlocks the cognitive capabilities of the entire 8 billion.

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.

Do you think there's a future? How many years out is it that 50% of good content is generated by AI?

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.

Over time, right.

But a lot of that is the interface, and then of course the incredible multimodal aspect of the interface that Google's been pushing.

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?

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.

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,

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.

There's nothing like it. You're in the trenches and yeah, you do form bonds that way for sure.

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?

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?

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?

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'?

What about the decision to recently add AI mode? So Google Search is the front page of the internet. It's a legendary minimalist thing with 10 blue links. That's when people think internet, they think that page. And now you're starting to mess with that. So the AI mode which is a separate tab and then integrating AI in the results. I'm sure there were some battles in meetings on that one.

Mhm.

I got a chance to listen to a bunch of Elizabeth Reed describe this. Two things stood out to me that you mentioned. One thing is what you were talking about is the query fan out, which I didn't even think about before. It's the powerful aspect of integrating a bunch of stuff on the web for you in one place. So yes, it provides that context so that you can decide which page to then go on to. The other really big thing speaks to the earlier in terms of productivity multiplier that we're talking about that she mentioned was language. So one of the things you don't quite understand is through AI mode you make for non-English speakers, you make English language websites accessible by in the reasoning process as you try to figure out what you're looking for. Of course, once you show up to a page, you can use a basic translate.

But that process of figuring it out, if you empathize with a large part of the world that doesn't speak English, their web is much smaller in that original language. And so it unlocks that huge cognitive capacity there that we take for granted here with all the bloggers and the journalists writing about AI mode. You forget that this now unlocks.

And you have sources and links now, so there's the 10 blue links with the AI overview on top that provides a nice summarization you can expand it.

I believe at least Liz said so, I actually didn't notice it. But there's ads in the AI overview also.

Uh, when ads in AI mode? Some when do you think? I mean it's okay. We should say.

Mhm.

Do you see a trajectory in the possible future where AI mode completely replaces the 10 blue links plus AI overview?

And the idea that AI mode will still take you to the web, to the human created web.

So really if users decide, right, they drive this.

I mean, it's just a different experience. I think Liz was talking about, I think you've mentioned that you ask more questions, you ask longer questions.

Yeah. Like it actually fuels curiosity. I think for me, I've been asking just a much larger number of questions of this blackbox machine, let's say, whatever it is. And with AI overview.

It makes the humans that create the web nervous.

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 at 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.

So there's, you spoken a little about this, talked about this sort of the slice of the web that will increasingly become about providing information for agents. So we can think about as 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 5, 10 years value for the human created, for the purpose of human consumption web, or will it all be agents in the end?

I have to ask you about Chrome. I have to say for me personally, Google Chrome is probably, I don't know, I'd like to see where I would rank it. But in this temptation, this is not a recency bias, although it might be a little bit, but I think it's up there top three, maybe the number one piece of software for me of all time. It's just incredible. The browsers are a window to the web. And Chrome really continued for many years, but even initially to push the innovation on that front when it was stale, and it continues to challenge, it continues to make it more performant, so efficient, just innovate constantly. And the Chromium aspect of it. Anyway, you were one of the pioneers of Chrome, pushing for it when it was an insane idea, probably one of the ideas that was criticized and doubted. So can you tell me the story of what it took to push for Chrome? What was your vision?

So for people who don't know, Sundar, it's probably fair to say you're the reason we have Chrome. Yes, I know there's a lot of incredible engineers, but pushing for it inside a company that probably was opposing it because it's a crazy idea, because as everybody probably knows, it's incredibly difficult to build a browser.

I mean you mentioned one of the craziest biggest moonshots which is Waymo. When I first saw over a decade ago a Waymo vehicle, a Google self-driving car vehicle, it was for me an aha moment for robotics. It made me fall in love with robotics even more than before. It 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. For a long time it has been just like you mentioned with scuba diving, just not listening to anybody, just calmly improving the system better and better, more testing, 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?

That said, the competition is heating up. You've been friendly with Elon, even though Tesla is a competitor, but you've been friendly with a lot of tech CEOs in that way, just showing respect towards them. What do you think about the robo taxi efforts that Tesla is doing? Do you see it as competition? What do you think? Do you like the competition?

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 the big thing that changes everything. Imagine over a period of a decade or two, 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?

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. So 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 which you can drive multiple businesses forward.

Effectively what we are doing in Google and Alphabet right.

Personalized responses, right?

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. I mean, to your friends, maybe your 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.

I think that's the holy grail. If you get this right, I think it allows more people to find that.

I have to ask you on the programming front. AI is getting really good at programming. Gemini, both the agentic and just the LLM, has been incredible. So a lot of programmers are really worried that they will lose their jobs. How worried should they be, and how should they adjust so they can be thriving in this new world where more and more code is written by AI?

So their productivity... they're not always using all the code, just you know, there's still a lot of editing, but like even for me, it's still programming as a side thing. I think I'm like 5x more productive. I think that's even for a large codebase that's touching a lot of users like Google's does. I'm imagining very soon that productivity should be going up even more.

I think the 10% is like a massive number. Like you know, if tomorrow I showed up and said, you can improve a large organization's productivity by 10%. When you have tens of thousands of engineers, that's a phenomenal number. And that's different than what others cite as statistics saying like this percentage of code is now written by AI. I'm talking more about overall productivity.

And which is the more important metric.

And there's a lot of aspects. I mean, the actual Google codebase might just improve because it'll become more standardized, easier for people to move about the codebase because AI will help with that, and therefore that will also allow the AI to understand the entire codebase better, which makes the engineering aspect... I've been using Cursor a lot as a way to program with Gemini and other models. One of its powerful things is it's aware of the entire codebase, and that allows you to ask questions of it. It allows the agents to move about that codebase in a really powerful way. I mean, that's a huge unlock.

Refactoring.