How it feels like Gemini is this through line across literally every single one of our products. To see it all come together. It is really special. I was just reflecting in the last couple of weeks. I think we've pretty much been shipping something every day and so it's a great feeling.
The Nano Banana Pro moment. I'm sure you've spent a bunch of time playing around with the model. People are going crazy with it, which is awesome.
To me, it showed how much latent creativity people have. People are going to express themselves and we are giving them the tools to do it the way they're thinking it in their head. And it empowers me. I feel like I've actually become more creative in the way I think about the world because of these tools.
I think in about 5 years we'll be having breathless excitement about quantum, hopefully like we are having with AI today.
Hey everyone, welcome back to Release Notes. My name is Logan Kilpatrick. I'm on the Google DeepMind team. Today we're joined by Sundar Pichai, who is the CEO of Google and Alphabet. And we're sitting here in Mountain View. Gemini 3 has rolled out. Nano Banana Pro has rolled out. And the reception's been super positive. So I feel like, do you want to sort of frame the moment of this progress to get to today where we sort of have state-of-the-art models across not just Gemini and Nano Banana Pro, but also Veo and some of the other music models and stuff like that across the board? It's like more and more soda the longer the time goes on. So yeah, do you want to frame that moment for us?
Well, first of all, great to be here. It's been a phenomenal week. I would say when you're working on stuff inside, you kind of visualize the moment when you can actually put it all out. And when you work on products, there's nothing more exciting than that. And that's what this week is. But I think it's based on a foundation over many, many years and of all the deep investments we built. And it was always clear to me, you could see the pace at which we were making progress, but to see it all come together, it is really special. I was just reflecting in the last couple of weeks. I think we've pretty much been shipping something every day and so it's a great feeling.
It is. Yeah. I remember back to you and I were talking probably a year and a half ago and I was complaining about something. I'm sure I was complaining about something and you were like something to the effect of pushing me to sort of see this long-term perspective. And I'm curious, I think obviously the story of getting to this moment that we're in now with state-of-the-art models and all this infrastructure to scale up Gemini across Google is this long, long-term perspective. And I think especially in this hyper competitive moment, how are you keeping that long-term perspective? Because it feels so much like a rat race right now in some sense to keep hill climbing 1% on all these leaderboards. But obviously that long-term perspective is super helpful.
Now, I think I've always, you know, I always force myself. You're obviously in the moment. We work in an industry where you move fast, you want to iterate fast. And I really enjoy that, but being able to pull back and making these long-term bets and being very focused over that time period on a long-term bet, I think it's always super important to do. I think, you know, obviously in 2016 I wanted the whole company to be AI first. A lot of what prompted that moment was 2012 was Google Brain, the famous cat paper which had breakthrough in image classification. 2014 we brought Google DeepMind in. January 2016 was the AlphaGo moment. And now, many people didn't notice, in May 2016 we announced our first TPU. So it was clear to me in 2016, seeing all that, we are about to go through another platform shift. And that was the bet on a full stack bet on setting up Google to be an AI first company. And since then we have been making a lot of progress there. So many breakthroughs coming from Google, including Transformer. We were putting it in our products in BERT and MUM and making search better, launching Google Photos and so on. But obviously with the generative AI moment, I realized the window was even bigger. People were ready to use the technology at scale. Consumers, developers and so on. So how do you respond to a moment like that? And for us it was about we kicked off Gemini as a project across Google Brain and Google DeepMind. And as part of that, then deciding to bring the teams together as Google DeepMind. We really ramped up our investments in our infrastructure, data centers, TPUs, GPUs and so on. It is then getting the company to move at a faster cadence. You now have the technology and once the GDM team started shipping Gemini, and you can talk about the series of Gemini milestones we have worked through, and it's been great to have you for a lot of the journey driving it too. And now how do you make sure you manifest it in all our products? There are many, many products which touch billions of users. How can Search iterate with the power of what these models can do? And so that's been the journey. But you can step back and understand that framework. And it's so exciting because for the first time, when you have a full stack approach, each layer when it innovates, it flows all the way to the top. This is what I tell people about pre-training. I'm like, the fact that pre-training for DeepMind is working so well in the Gemini models, it's like post-training and RL is like this accelerant of the underlying capability. And I feel like our infrastructure is a similar story.
Absolutely. You make your infrastructure better. You make the models better at pre-training, post-training, test time compute. How do you take those capabilities and then manifest it in products? How does Nano Banana show up in your products? Generative UI in search with AI mode, right? So you're expressing it at all these layers. And not to mention being able to take that and give it to developers who are then innovating on top. And that's what creates this multiplicative effect. And it's always incredibly thrilling to watch.
But you know, always had this long-term vision of how we can do it. Some of this took time because we have a full stack approach. When we had to respond to this Gen AI moment, I remember we were short on capacity. So we had to invest to ramp up all these things to get it to the scale so that you had a fixed cost around it.
Yeah. So if you were on the outside, it looked like we were quiet or we were behind, but we were putting all the building blocks in place and then executing on top of it. We are on the other side now, which is what you can see the pace at which teams are moving forward.
Yeah, it's been incredible to see this. You mentioned this like Gemini showing up in all of our products. And I think I was talking to Josh and Tulsi about this and Corey about this. I feel like the challenge for some of these launches now is SIM shipping. And maybe not even from a product perspective, but capacity and how do you make sure that the models show up really well across all these different product experiences. I feel like has introduced a new... Corey made the comment something to the effect of like we've figured out how to do the models and obviously there's more that we need to do, but deploying them across all of Google's product surfaces is extremely hard. And it gets me to this... I sort of had this realization at IO this year. And I want to gut check this with you because maybe you have a different perspective. But historically, other than maybe your Gmail or your Google account, there hasn't been this through line across this whole suite of different products that Google has. Everything from Cloud to Waymo to Search to everything else to Gmail. And now it feels like Gemini is this through line across literally every single one of our products, which is just such a... it feels like there's something magic there that is happening. I don't know what your reaction is to that.
I think Gemini... I know it's a good observation. I think Gemini to me is a much more... it's a very clear manifestation of what is the AI first strategy. Because now you have something tangible like Gemini which people can understand. And Gemini, you're right, improves everything from Search to YouTube to Cloud to Veo. What I loved about the Gemini 3 launch, you talked about SIM shipping. We shipped it across many of our products. But it was fascinating for me to see, on X, it could be Copilot or Replit or Figma, people all coming together. They're also SIM shipping. And to me, that's innovation at scale. It's not just us. It's other companies in the world. It's been extraordinary to see.
Yeah. It's awesome. One of the other threads and obviously the Nano Banana Pro moment. I'm sure you've spent a bunch of time playing around with the model. People are going crazy with it, which is awesome.
I have to keep asking, did we improve the productivity of the world or is it a net progress or not? The infographics seem amazing.
And I think as we move beyond the fun stage, I just saw on X, I think Ben Budgerin had tweeted this infographic of his scorewave analysis. So it actually made me look through that thing to try and understand it. One of the things PowerPoint many years ago unleashed is people kept making more and more slides. There was so much information and it kept expanding. Maybe with Nano Banana Pro we are back to a phase by which we can kind of compress it and give it to the world in a more digestible way.
That was going to be exactly where I was going. There's something I've historically been personally skeptical about, like how useful a lot of the gen media models would be for the world. And obviously it's useful from an entertainment perspective, but it felt like Nano Banana Pro crossed the chasm specifically with infographics and actually grounding with Google Search in that. I believe I can see very clearly how this is part of Google's mission of organizing the world's information and actually making it universally accessible to people with those infographics. It blew me away. It was so interesting. And I feel like it's a great reminder that we're going to see those use cases. And I think the Nano Banana team, if I remember correctly from one of the pieces of content we were doing, they were like, yeah, we weren't even trying to make infographics work really well. It just happened as the model got really good and text rendering capabilities improved so much, which is fascinating. The other thing it shows me is how much latent creativity is there in the world.
Yeah, so one of the other beautiful things we're witnessing is I think people are going to express themselves and we are giving them the tools to do it the way they're thinking it in their head. I think if otherwise we've been constrained by the tools in front of people, you may not have realized it, but we are creating more and more expressive tools and they're more and more accessible to more and more people. And so watching that, it's incredible to see as well.
Yeah, I've got another question about that in a second, but one of... I'll give Tulsi credit for this. Tulsi had suggested when we were talking yesterday to ask you about this because she was curious what, as you see these launches happen in these large tentpole moments for Google, what is your success barometer for these moments? Is it the reception online? Is it the adoption look like on day one? Or how are you measuring if this thing is actually moving the needle for Google?
