I'm super excited to talk to you, Lila, about Google. In 2017, you spent more than 50 hours interviewing for your current role. 50 hours. Wow. As chief operating officer at Google DeepMind. In part because Google wanted to make sure you were right for the role, and I'm sure you wanted to make sure Google was right for you. So why did you ultimately choose to join Google and this team?
At the end of the day, I decided, if I can bring all of my 30 years of tech experience, of making sure that technology happened to benefit people — if I could bring that into the field of AI as the first chief operating officer at Google DeepMind, then that would be a meaningful career and legacy to leave behind. So, I joined because I felt candidly that it was like a moral calling, that if I could help make sure that AI got developed responsibly and with humanity in mind.
Can you tell me what your childhood was like growing up in Indiana as a first-generation immigrant?
I did grow up as a first-generation Arab American. My mother came from Jerusalem, and my father is Lebanese. And they came both to the United States for their education. And they met in Pennsylvania, and eventually were going to move to the West Coast. And then happened to stop in Indiana. And at the time, I was just two years old, but my sister had just been born, and she has cerebral palsy. So we ended up making Indiana our home, because my parents were able to get my sister into a school there. And so I ended up growing up there, dark hair, curly, dark skin, totally stood out. I didn't even know what a pie was, apple pie, when our neighbors brought it over. Growing up in Indiana was a pretty special place. You get the work ethic of the Midwest, and first job as a corn detasseler. I was set.
What did having a sister with cerebral palsy teach you about navigating life and fighting for what is yours? Even if you are different maybe than the other kids.
Yeah, my sister was just one year younger than me, so we grew up very close. And as the eldest, I always thought that I had the toughest job. But you can't really complain when you see what your own sibling has to go through. You know, people will see a wheelchair and then make assumptions, not questioning what she could really do. And she ended up graduating second in the high school class, going to prom, and really adjusting. So I think in many ways, what Indiana gave us was learning how to be part of a community. And my parents taught us from a young age of really being proud of our background. We learned to embrace it as part of our own identity, that we didn't have to be like everyone else to be able to fit in.
How has your background influenced the way you've approached your work?
I think so much of it comes with just being willing to take on risks, and seeing opportunity in things that other people might be concerned about. While my background is as an engineer and in technology, there's a through line of how does technology really help with connecting people and enabling social progress.
According to Forbes, just 11% of tech executives are women. You've been able to forge your own path, Lila, and I'm curious what the challenges were that you faced as a young woman in this field.
Starting off in electrical engineering, one of the very few women in the field, to joining, you know, Intel in a semiconductor industry. I was always young, and I was always a woman, and there was no hiding either one of those. And what I found was, along the way, just finding people who would be willing to give me a chance. I got very fortunate in having a lot of really strong sponsors throughout my career. They opened the door and let me walk through it. They appreciated that I brought a different way of doing things. And so, a lot of times I would be the person that would take on the challenges that no one else would take, because I saw the opportunity.
You have had some incredible breakthroughs at Google DeepMind. One in particular is called AlphaFold. What is that?
AlphaFold is an advanced AI system that predicts the 3D structure of a protein. A protein is the basic building block of life. So if you can predict how it folds, you can understand its function. But if it misfolds, you can also understand what maybe went wrong. And that can be helpful, for example, to understand diseases, of what's maybe causing a disease. So Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, those are examples of a protein-based disease. So we developed an AI system to say, what if we could use AI to help us find patterns and uncover the prediction path for proteins? And that's what we did. It now has opened up the field for scientists to make great advancements in the work that they're doing on top of it. So instead of spending the four years on understanding a single protein, they're working on things like how to fight industrial waste, how to better understand diseases, how to maybe unlock the areas of plant science for food security.
Tell me about some of the breakthroughs you've been able to maneuver, thanks to AlphaFold.
We've provided a database of 200 million proteins that you can go on just like a Google Map search. There's a university in the U.K. working on plastic-eating enzymes to try to deal with industrial waste. There is also work happening on crop and food security as well.
