Well, thank you for joining the BBC, Mr. Pichai. And particularly at this time in the stock market, in the investment charts, just being around this part of the world right now, there's obviously something really important happening the rest of the world needs to know, and it's great to be able to get your answers to these questions. How would you characterize what is happening in Silicon Valley right now?
Well, it's an extraordinary moment, even by Silicon Valley standards. You know, every decade or so, you have these inflection points. You know, you had a new technology: the personal computer at one point, the internet coming in the late '90s, then it was mobile. Then it's been cloud, what we call cloud. Now it's clearly the era of AI, and that's the excitement you probably felt around campus as well as in this whole region.
And can you give us a sense of the scale? Clearly the metric that people kind of go to is the market cap. These are extraordinary numbers for you at three and a half trillion, Nvidia at 5 trillion. The sheer amount of investment going in. Give us a sense of scale.
One way to think about the scale is what we are all investing in capital to build out the infrastructure that's needed for artificial intelligence. You know, maybe four years ago, Google was spending less than $30 billion per year. This year, that number is going to be over $90 billion. And if you collectively add what all the companies are doing, we have well over a trillion dollars of investment going in to building the infrastructure for this moment. And one way I think about it is in the next couple of years, we'll end up building what we probably built in the past 10 to 20 years. So hopefully just in a couple of years. That's right. So that gives you the scale at which this is ramping up.
Now you mentioned some of those phases of technological advancement that happened with much market excitement as well. And the obvious question it's around the whole of this country and the whole world right now is: is it a bubble?
Look, there are two ways of thinking about the question. I look at the actual progress we are making in terms of the model capabilities, and the progress is palpably exciting. People are using this, and we're deploying it in our products. Consumers are excited about using it. We are giving it to companies; they're using it to make their companies better. So you see real demand, and we are constrained in our ability to serve that demand. So given the potential of this technology, the excitement is very rational. It's also true that when we go through these investment cycles, there are moments we overshoot, right? Collectively as an industry, we can look back at the internet. Right now, there was clearly a lot of excess investment, but none of us would question whether the internet was profound or did it drive a lot of impact. It fundamentally changed how we work digitally as a society. I expect AI to be the same. So I think it's both rational, and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this.
I mean, you just described your excitement about how Google's hardware, which is the key scarce resource. I guess would your argument be that whatever happens, whatever appears to be a frothy, exotic deal from one of your competitors, Google will be immune from any bursting of the bubble because of your spectrum of investments across all technologies?
No company is going to be immune, including us. If you overinvest, we'll have to work through that phase. But we are better positioned. For many years, we've taken a deeply differentiated approach to how we've approached AI. One of the first things I did as CEO was to shift the company to what I called an AI-first approach, and part of that was doing all the parts of what it takes to build great AI technology. So we call it a full-stack approach. You can think of it as a soup-to-nuts approach, all the way from the underlying physical infrastructure to the research you need to do to drive this technology forward, to deploying it in products and platforms, be it search, be it in YouTube, be it in Android, and so on. So we have taken the deep approach, so we are able to invest at scale and make it work across all these products and businesses. And I think we are better positioned to take a long-term view and approach this moment.
Okay. Well, let's take that and then let's try and sum up, if you like, the ultimate power of the tools you have built for people at home. You know, how effective could it be? Could an AI agent do your job at some point?
Look, I think where we are is right now you can interact with this AI, ask questions, go back and forth, and have these intelligent exchanges on many, many topics. I think the next step in the next 12 months you will see the evolution being that they are able to do more complex tasks for you. So that's where it gets really interesting. You know, I have to go shop something. I have to buy a birthday gift for my spouse, and you know, can I ask this chatbot to go do that, right? So I think that kind of what we call agentic experiences is what we are all excited about. So down the line, that means there are moments it can help you make a decision, right? Like it could be: should I invest in this stock? Ask the question. Or my doctor is recommending a treatment, and how should I think about the pros and cons of that treatment? So those are all real, tangible use cases. There is still work to be done to unlock those capabilities, but that's the journey which has been so exciting to see.
Okay, so still CEOs are safe in their jobs?
Well, I think what a CEO does is maybe one of the easier things for an AI to do one day.
But the whole point of the value and productivity kind of offer to companies that are buying all your goods and your services is to automate many human tasks. Is it not?
Let me put it this way, right? I think people today are juggling many things, and people are overloaded. We've always had, back in history, you know, it could be a dishwasher coming to your home. I remember growing up, when we got our first refrigerator in the home, how much it radically changed my mom's life, right? And so you can view it as automating some, but it freed her up to do other things. So you are going to have, take the example of a radiologist: the number of scans people are getting is growing year on year, and the number of images per scan is also rising pretty significantly. How do you help a radiologist cope with this increased demand? Maybe an AI tool can help that way. So I think that's what you will see more or less.
I get it, you want to focus on the win-wins, but it's many people, many aspirational middle classes across the West are thinking, 'Hang on a minute, it's affecting lawyers' jobs. It's affecting creative industries. It's affecting accounting jobs. It's affecting journalism, too.' It's affecting the media in general. And they're surprised by it, and they're wondering, do you know which jobs are going to be safer? Have you got an idea?
Two things. One is, first of all, look, I said many years ago AI is the most profound technology humanity is ever working on, and it has potential for extraordinary benefits, and we will have to work through societal disruptions. And you are highlighting that. It'll end up creating new opportunities. As an example, I think anybody, just like YouTube has done, anybody will be able to create content. You could be a high school student in a few years down maybe envision a feature-length movie and make it, right? That's extraordinary. So it will create new opportunities. It will evolve and transition certain jobs. Right? And people will need to adapt. And then there will be areas where it will impact some jobs. So as a society, I think we need to be having those conversations, and part of it is how do you develop this technology responsibly and give society time to adapt as we absorb this technology. I think these are all very, very important and fair questions.
Just very practically, parents don't know what to advise their kids anymore. Just to ride out this AI wave, give us some tips.
Based on what I see, I wouldn't change anything of how we've always thought. I think there's going to be a wide variety of disciplines which will end up mattering. I would encourage the next generation to embrace the technology, learn to use it in the context of what you do. And I think people who learn to adopt and adapt to AI will do better. It doesn't matter whether you want to be a teacher, a doctor. All those professions will be around, but the people who will do well in each of those professions are people who learn how to use these tools.
Okay. So all of the hopes, the hype, the valuations, the social benefit of this transformation you've just described is built on a central assumption that the technology functions, that it works. Let me propose one simple test of Gemini, which is your booming ChatGPT kind of competitor. Is it accurate always? Does it tell the truth?
Look, we are working hard from a scientific standpoint to ground it in real world information, right? And there are areas. Part of what we've done with Gemini is we've brought the power of Google Search, so it uses Google Search as a tool to try and answer to give answers more accurately. But there are moments these AI models fundamentally have a technology by which they're predicting what's next, and they are prone to errors.
Yeah. And you know some of the examples: there is an example of glue as a pizza ingredient, a senator wrongly accused of assault. I mean, this is bad, isn't it?
Today, I think we take pride in the amount of work we put in to give as accurate information as possible, but the current state-of-the-art AI technology is prone to some errors, right? This is why people also use Google Search, and we have other products which are more grounded in providing accurate information, right? But the same tools are helpful if you want to creatively write something, okay? So you have to learn to use these tools for what they are good at, and not blindly trust everything they say.
Okay. Don't blindly trust. But let me suggest to you that you have a special responsibility because this whole model type, the transformer model, the T in ChatGPT, was invented here under you, and you know that it's a probability. And I just wonder if you accept the end result of all this fantastic investment is that information is less reliable.
I think if you only construct systems standalone and you only rely on that, that would be true. Which is why I think the information ecosystem has to be much richer than just having AI technology being the sole product in it. Sure. Truth matters. Journalism matters. All of the surrounding things we have today matters, right? So if you're a student, you're talking to your teacher. If as a consumer, you're going to a doctor, you want to trust your doctor. All of that.
You want to trust the little summaries that come up the top. Okay. Well, the scale of the AI buildout you've just described so vividly is creating another trade-off, not just for you, but for humanity on energy. I think this is an opportunity to be frank, Mr. Pichai, with the world. Is there a new calculus now? Is the buildout of AI more important than climate?
Over time, I don't think this needs to be a trade-off or a zero-sum game. I think one of the things I'm excited about, because the energy needs through this transformation is so immense, we as well as others are investing to develop new sources of energy. We just finished signing the largest corporate purchase for nuclear fusion energy with Commonwealth Fusion Systems. We have many purchase agreements for energy from small modular nuclear reactors. We are using geothermal energy in our data centers. So the amount of dollars, R&D dollars, capital investments going into these new sources of energy, I think will actually accelerate. So you're right, AI is dramatically increasing demand for energy in a way that the current systems can't fully cope. But that is driving extraordinary investments in solar, in battery technology, in nuclear technology and other sources. So I think, as a technologist, I'm optimistic through this moment that we will have abundant sources of renewable energy in the future.
I mean, by the end of the decade, I think more energy will be used by data centers than the whole of India, 50% more than all of the EV fleet. You sort of parked or dropped your 2030 sustainability net zero target. Is that right?
