Sundar, you're the CEO of Alphabet and Google. Welcome back to The Code.
Glad, good to be back. Feels like a nice tradition post I/O to be talking to you. So, good to be back.
I think this is the third year we've done this after I/O. I'm excited. Thank you for keeping the tradition alive. Lots to talk about. You announced a lot of things yesterday during the keynote. There's AI mode rolling out for US users, big updates to Gemini, there's VIO 3 and Imagine, the generators. You solved Pokémon with robots, which is very exciting. You know, my takeaway yesterday was that Google feels very confident now. There's a real confidence about the technology coming to life and the products. A lot of things are shipping imminently. What's the one piece that gave you that confidence? Is it just the volume of things that are shipping? Is it one technology that clicked into being ready for consumers? Where is it coming from?
Look, I think it comes from the depth and breadth of the AI frontier we are pushing, like it is in a more fundamental and foundational way. We spoke a lot about this theme called research becomes reality, but it is, you know, always felt we are a deep computer science company and you know, we've been AI first for a while. So, putting all that together and bringing it to our products at the depth and breadth is what I think it's really pleasing to see. For example, like you know, people may not have noticed it much. It was so quick. We spoke about text diffusion models in the middle of the whole thing. But, you know, but we are pushing the frontier on all dimensions, right? And so, Demis spoke about world models. So, I think to me that's the exciting part like how deep we are pushing this frontier and then bringing it to users. And so, maybe that's what makes it feel that way.
You mentioned research into reality several times. Obviously, a lot of these projects have been cooking in labs for a long time. You've said many times you think AI will be as profound as electricity. Over the past many, many years you and I have talked about it. But, you said something yesterday that I think adds to that. Which is that we're in a new phase of the platform shift. Right. And people have talked about AI being a platform shift for quite a while. But, it always has meant to me that there's a user interface platform shift coming, right? We're going to interact with computers in natural language in more natural ways, and they will interact with us back in that same way, and everything will change. Is that the platform shift?
Yeah, there are, you know, you're right. Each of these platform shifts, you know, changes many things on that IO front. Nothing to do with Google IO, just IO in the traditional computer science sense. You know, you could feel it yesterday when I watched the Android XR. I've used them and played around with them. But, watching it, two people talking in different languages, you can envision the future one day where it'll actually be seamless. In a way you couldn't have done it with phones. You couldn't have done it without AI. Because there's nothing in your way. You're looking at the other person and talking, right? And so, that is an element of platform shift. But, there are many more elements, right? This is the only platform where I think the actual platform is over time capable of creating and self-improving and so on. In a way we could have never talked about any other platform before. So, that's why I think it's much more profound than the other platform shifts. It'll allow people to create new things in a way, you know, because at each layer of the stack, there's going to be profound improvements. And so, I think that virtual cycle you get in terms of how you can unleash this creative power to all of society, be it software engineers, be it creators. I think that is going to happen in a much more multiplicative way. And that, you know, so when I say it's a next phase, I'm talking about that part, too.
Let me just make that more concrete for people. I think the last platform shift we all understand is the shift to mobile.
And that was, right, we're going to have multi-touch, we're going to have faster cell connections, we're going to increase processing power that can go with you everywhere. And then there was a layer of applications that was enabled by all of those things.
You can push a button and a Toyota camera will show up wherever you are in the world. It's like a very powerful thing that required all of those ideas. How would you describe the phase we're in now compared to that? The phase of this part because the first phase of AI was the transformers work and the models work and we can all see this capability.
The second phase, what is it to you?
Just imagine, you know, like when the internet came, blogging became a thing. You know, pre-internet, very few people had a means by which they could put out their thoughts out to the world, right? You know, with the internet came a new medium it allowed people to create and express themselves in a new way. With mobile came cameras and you could shoot and like you know, you could create videos. You know, look at what's happened with YouTube. For me, the similar part of this is you know, we're all talking about things like vibe coding. Yesterday, I saw VO3. Right? So we are now in that phase. I think people are going to be able to create AI applications, you can call it. But you know, vibe coding, there are many names to it, but that power is yet to be unleashed. We're barely scratching the surface, right? And these models are now, you know, they're not quite there. You can kind of do one-shot coding, but you really need to know, be a programmer to kind of go iterate and create something with polish, right? But that frontier is evolving pretty rapidly. So I think you're going to see a new wave of things just like mobile did, just the internet did. You know, I came to Google at the time when Ajax was the revolution. The fact that the web became dynamic, you know, you had things like Google Maps, Flickr, Gmail, all that suddenly came into existence, right? But I think AI is going to turbocharge in a way we haven't seen before.
It feels like to me like what you're describing is we're in the phase where the products are developed, right? The capabilities were the first phase, and now we're going to make some actual products.
And more people can build products than ever before. That's the multiplicative part I'm talking about. Not just this platform helps you create more products. The process of creating, developing, etc. is going to be accessible to a much wider swath of humanity than ever before.
