Know what you think things are going to be like for big tech and how things are going to play out for Google now that President Trump is back in the White House. So probably makes the most sense to start right there. Tell me what you think.
So, look, I think the president and his team have been clear that they see technology as an asset for the country. They see the economic upside that comes with executing the right way. They want to clear away some of the impediments to investing. Things like permitting delays, etc., which is going to be an important part of providing the infrastructure backbone.
Do you feel optimistic about their chances for success when you say they're just expanding?
But I think the opportunity with AI is profound.
Oh, no, no, no. I meant the things that President Trump and his team have been saying over the past several weeks about what they want to do in order to supercharge the US economy and open up opportunities for American technology. I say those things are easy to say, developing smart policy and furthermore executing smart policy oftentimes, right? Not so easy. And I'm curious to know about your level of optimism, hopefulness, if you will, for what can be accomplished. You referred to it as Trump 1.0.
To work with Treasury and then the Treasury and Fed during the financial crisis. And I think for all of us in the private sector, it's absolutely imperative to engage because to your point, the devil's in the details in landing things the right way so that you don't have unintended consequences. There's quite a bit that needs to be done. I think importantly, when we look at the implications and the upside from investing in AI, this is something that the U.S. and the West needs to continue to execute against and execute well because the implications are so great. It's not just economic upside, it's advancing science. It's what we can do with education and health, and it becomes a national security opportunity and imperative. And I think when you have economic...
You're right. But I think it requires each of us to constructively engage, as I expect they will, as we most certainly want to, to make sure things get landed in the most productive way. It helps to explain, I suppose, why Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, of course, and Sundar, your CEO, spent some time with President Trump in the weeks following the inauguration, as did many other leading figures in the tech industry. Ruth, you made mention of your advisory work for the US government back around the financial crisis. I'm glad you did actually, because it helps to establish an important context. Those of you here recognized Ruth in her current role and maybe her immediate president role. She's now the President and chief...
And then, as you mentioned, you helped to advise the US government on AIG, Fannie and Freddie, and you were the CFO at Morgan Stanley as well. And I mention this because I'm going to come back to a little later in our conversation. In the meantime, help me on a personal level, what do you hope for most out of this kind of political, at the very least, political reset that America has experienced with this election?
You know, I look at it really at this point through the lens that we're all privileged to live in a time where I can be applied not just to economic upside, but when you look, for example, at what...
For Alpha Fold, described as the single greatest contribution to drug discovery. With our colleague John Jumper as well. But he was asked in his Nobel speech, and he said what really motivated him and what motivates him is solving the most intractable problems. And when you think about the application of AI to health as an example, early detection saves lives. At Google, we have pioneered early detection of metastatic cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer. We're doing it with diabetic retinopathy. These are really exciting. So when you say how is this administration going to open new opportunities? What are we going to land? There's a whole swath. If you want, again, go back to the...
Tremendous inefficiency across public and private sector. One of the questions you don't see most Yahoo! Go figure except to Bloomberg. One of the questions I'm most often asked by finance ministers is they say I'm not going to get more budget. How do I make my budget work better for my constituents? How do I unlock it? And there are so many examples with tech, which of course, is what the Trump administration wants to do as part of Dogefather. Just give you one that I really like. We did this in the stadium and done a number of places. They said we need to be able to deliver better for our constituents payments and other responses. So implemented our AI based customer support. And they initially said we have four critical languages in Minnesota. Can you help us do it in four languages? Google Translate. We have 260 languages.
I can't actually deliver education to kids without Google Translate. So the ability to deliver services is all part of what I think we're going to be able to see across what the Trump administration intends to do, but more broadly.
You mentioned doge. No one appears to wield more influence at the moment over President Trump than Elon Musk. And I'm curious, I know other people are curious because I've talked to them about this. Is having Elon so close to the president on balance, a positive or a negative for the tech industry?
For the tech industry? You're not seeing for the country.
An interesting question. Well, I'm but that might be where I'm going next. Okay.
I think about it in the context of the country.
If you like him, I think we all know that we're at Google, very involved with quite a number of the businesses that he's incubated and built. Space X is a great example and what an extraordinary accomplishment that is. Anybody who is not you, StarLink, has to try StarLink. And so to have somebody at this time where you're trying to unlock the potential for it is not a foregone conclusion that each one of us, public and private sector, will radically rethink what we're doing in a way that gets the trillions of dollars of GDP upside. That is work to do. So to have somebody who is such an entrepreneur and broad thinker will be an unlock and to understand that technology is a critical part of both productivity and social service.
But beyond what he might help to unlock in the way of opportunity for tech. To your point, for the country and perhaps more broadly for the world, is the... Are the ideas that Elon is bringing to not just President Trump himself, but those around him in government healthy?
You're talking about a broad set. I sure am. I know I'm going to say in my way, I tell people all the time, stay in your lane and I'm going to stick in the tech lane. So there are solutions that should be implemented. Each one of us needs to implement it, and I will leave it to others more broadly.
How about for Google? You mentioned that Google and Alphabet work collaboratively with some of Elon's...
That affects the companies that the industry's excuse me that he's in and that you're in. Is that a risk?
Well, let me take you to one of my favorite examples of something important that we're working on, and that is Waymo, self-driving cars. Right. And he's clearly focused for Tesla on self-driving. More than a million people die on the road every year through human error. We're not going to save every life with self-driving cars, but we're already seeing data that shows already today a meaningful delta in safety errors. Issues with Waymo.
So there are some areas where actually having another voice at the table around what is proper regulation. We think that there you need to have transparency around all issues of engagement, safety risks, etc. There proper high bars that actually make it really clear that we're delivering not only a great rider experience, anyone who goes to San Francisco has to try. This is one of the top tourist attractions. But it's that's a positive. Like Waymo, the momentum in Waymo is pretty extraordinary. We have with Waymo self-driven 5 million miles, 4 million of which were in the last year alone. So it gives you a sense of kind of where this is a hockey stick curve. It gives you a hockey stick curve where...
Were sold to X? Oh my gosh, when are we going to talk about our business? I'm about to.
You heard him move on. So the president in an interview that he did with No, no, no, we're going we're going there. We're going to I promise you, we are going straight to Google. I promise. So the president now president, of course, Trump in an interview with my editor in chief, John Micklethwait back in October, suggested that unlike the Biden administration, he might not want to break Google up because he sees it as a bulwark against Chinese technology. His direct quote, China is afraid of...
You know, we clearly are of the view that the DOJ's proposed remedies make no sense, that we're delivering a product solution that customers want that delivers tremendous value. And it wasn't lost on many people that actually the same time that was coming out. The Nobel Committee thought it was wise to give Dennis and John Jumper a Nobel Prize for this extraordinary breakthrough with Alpha Fold. I've already commented on it briefly, but predicting protein structure for all proteins known to mankind 200 million proteins. When Dennis embarked on that, another one always quoting Nobel Prize winner as a colleague, it's like a great place to be.
Something that is being credited with the single greatest contribution to drug discovery. And why not is become the phrase that I use for each one of us like. Why not radically rethink what is possible with education? Why not radically rethink? How do you get early diagnosis to everyone around the planet? Why don't you rather why not think about the thought of the people who are still not connected? So are know, are we able work? I think that this is a critical time. Inflection points are not as evident in the moment as they are later. And as a country, we should embrace it as the company we most certainly are. We're investing aggressively. And I think it's important that we continue to do so. So that's why we're approaching it.
I thank you. One person.
Transform economies. It has the potential to transform the way we live, but it has the potential to transform companies. Right. Including yours. So share with us a sense of how AI is at this very moment transforming Google. What are you using it for? How is it making the company more streamlined, more efficient, allowing it to perhaps redeploy resources into other areas?
So I think that one of the fascinating elements about where we are on this AI curve is economists have pretty broad range of estimates about the economic upside in the trillions. In the US alone, it's up to 25 trillion by 2030. Globally, the numbers are pretty staggering.
We're leveraging Gemini and the opportunity basically as support for software engineers and bring them up to do additional higher value add work. It is. We are still on that journey in finance. There are opportunities with how we analyse every element, the data, think about it, there are large datasets. What are we doing on working capital? What are we doing on closing the books? What are we doing on forecasting our tax, people looking at it to digest information. So it is. But those the reason I started with the trillions is the key question continues to be so what are those radical rethink opportunities? That's a curve that we like. Everyone continue to go down. And I think that what we're most excited about is when we see across the board...
We can step back and look at how we can fundamentally change what we're doing. You just need to start really on the journey. You need to get the puck on the ice because the more you use it, the more you benefit from it. See the doors that open.
