My interview with Google's CEO Sundar Pichai. We covered Gemini, agents, diffusion models, self-improving AI (AlphaEvolve), ...
Questions asked in this interview
9
0:00Is this a departure from transformers or is it something else?
0:14Are we at that inflection point given it seems like this is self-improving artificial intelligence?
0:24What happens to people that do knowledge work?
1:31How do you think about all these different architectures?
4:08And if you were to point to one area, whether it's the core intelligence of the model, the memory, the scaffolding around the agents, what do you think is the highest leverage area for improvement?
5:06Do you think there's a need for an open source or open protocol similar to MCP or agent to agent, but for agent memory?
6:47Or is it a combination of things? What do you think?
8:01So how do you think about that transition if there is a transition?
9:11How would they prepare, stay relevant, how do they stay on top of things?
Just lean into these tools. Just get in the mindset saying, 'Look, I'm just now a super assistant with you all the time and just take advantage of it.'
Do you see the Google search homepage being the kind of first place people go to find things? Sundar, thank you so much for sitting with me. I noticed you announced the Gemini model is going to be a world model, right? You're transitioning to this world model. Does that take significant architecture changes? Is this a departure from Transformers or is it something else?
You know, Google DeepMind has always had a broad view of all the things that need to be developed for AGI. So they have efforts both on the G2 models, they have parallel efforts into building world models which is different from the main line of Gemini 2.5 Pro. But things we are learning there will make its way there. Like when we built Veo 3, it's grounded in physics. Some of that innovation came from our work on world models. So that's how I would think about it.
And then the diffusion version of Gemini that was I was not expecting that. Yeah, so I think it was five times faster than the flashlight. Is that going to start to make its way into this world model? How do you think about all these different architectures?
Look, first of all, today all of the mainline Gemini models are autoregressive LLMs. They are next token prediction models in architecture, whereas our image models have been diffusion based models. So doing text diffusion, I think it's a different paradigm. For the same capability, it's so much faster, but it's obviously behind the Gemini mainline in terms of capability. But I think there'll be areas where you can use them. So we're going to push the diffusion paradigm as hard as possible and then where we need to kind of bring them together we will do that. I think it's good to push all the directions in parallel.
The next thing I want to talk about, so AlphaEvolve. I read that paper a couple times, saw the project, was absolutely blown away. This is AI that can discover new knowledge, right? And so it really feels like we're at this inflection point of the intelligence explosion. Do you think we have the right ingredients to really... are we at that inflection point given it seems like this is self-improving artificial intelligence?
Look, you're spot on to the potential for something like AlphaEvolve. I think it's amazing. We launched that like a week ahead of IO in this low-key way. It's one of the most groundbreaking work we are doing. But the fact that we spoke a lot about agents today, but the fact that you can have these agents which can go improve code, make discoveries, etc., what an extraordinary paradigm that is.
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Pichai, S. (2025, May 23). Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Gemini, Self-improving AI, and World Models [Interview transcript]. Matthew Berman. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/175478/
MLA
Sundar Pichai. "Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Gemini, Self-improving AI, and World Models." Matthew Berman, 23 May. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/175478/.
BibTeX
@misc{pichai2025_175478,
author = {Sundar Pichai},
title = {Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Gemini, Self-improving AI, and World Models},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Matthew Berman. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {may},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/175478/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
