Can y'all hear me? All right, welcome. This is the dialogue stage. My name is Matt Berman. I'm the CEO of Ford Future and I am super excited to share a conversation with the man who has been leading Google for the last 10 years. Please help me welcome Sundar Pichai.
Hi, first of all, great to be here. Thanks for doing it, Matt. And I love your content and I appreciate all of you joining as well.
You have a unique insight and probably very strong opinions about the future of the internet. And so that's where I want to start. It seems like the internet is being transformed right before our eyes. Agents are being built. They're infiltrating the internet. And I'm wondering, do you see the future as agents being the entry point to the internet for most people?
You know, agents are going to be a fundamental part of how we work because having used them, you know, if you're living, you know, maybe today the people who are on the frontier of how agents work are developers, right? You know, and particularly with coding, you know, two years ago, most developers started using these tools. They started giving them more and more auto completions and you were accepting them etc. But over the last few months, developers are actually doing agentic workflows, right? The developers on the frontier and they are actually deploying agents, orchestrating agents. You saw the demo in anti-gravity for building an OS, you're effectively in an agentic workflow. So I think once you get the taste of using something like that and the superpower that comes with it, I think it's they're genuinely adding value in a way I think people will use them. I think it's important we build it in a way that users feel a sense of control and agency and transparency when they use agents. I think that's important. But I think yes, I do expect agents to be a core part of how we use the web, but that doesn't mean it'll take away from people use the web for a lot of reasons, right? And you're entertaining yourself. You're trying to do something meaningful at times. And you know, it depends on your shopping, what you're shopping for. You know, if it's your weekly groceries versus you're trying to buy your loved one a gift, right? And so I think it'll allow humans to use the internet in ways that gives them joy and purpose and not always be forced to deal with I have to fill these 18 form fields to renew a DMV license. Right. So, you know, so that's how agents will separate it out.
I think yeah, I mean I'm particularly excited to have agents actually do real world tasks. You mentioned the DMV. That use case is incredible. But I also think about putting so much trust into agents to really be the arbiter of our information diet and I'm wondering how do we make sure that we are putting the trust in the right agents and the agents are deciding correctly what information that we should have.
You know, you are doing a version of that if you use Gmail and there's a spam filter working on your behalf, filtering spam like in some ways you're like trusting an agent. It is an agent. You know, I look at it as working on Waymo. You have to make people trust sitting on the backseat of a Waymo and let the car go. You know, that is an agent in some ways, but people are willing to trust. But that's because we've done the work over time to demonstrate to people both with data with how we have operated it that it's fundamentally safe and it's freeing you up to enjoy the ride. I think it's all depends on the value you deliver, right? I think that's why I think the building the agency and trust with users is a shared journey and we have to get that part right. Part of the reason in Gemini Spark, Gemini Spark is actually very powerful under the hood, but we are taking the deliberate careful step of making it work with your first party surfaces like Gmail, calendar, etc. before we expose third party with MCP and full computer use and browser use. You know, it can do all that, but we want to make sure users are in control and they feel comfortable. We are getting their feedback, improving the product as we give those capabilities.
You know, Sundar, if I'm crossing the street, you mentioned Waymo. I actually trust walking in front of a Waymo more so than I trust walking in front of a human driver. I don't know if other people agree with that, but there is it was almost an immediate trust that I had for Waymo. So, I'm hoping agents are the same way. I'm old enough to remember the early days of the internet, which was an absolute wild west, but you got to raw information very quickly. And I think, you know, part of something I'm concerned about is that we're increasing the buffer between us and the raw internet. We saw it, you know, a little bit with the browser, a little bit with apps, and now more so with agents. How do we account for that?
People in our experience with search and in YouTube, YouTube is a great example, right? People have this sense of connection with the creators they like and follow, right? And you know, so that's a big part of what they're looking for. So I think people are in different mindsets when there are times they want to discover content on the web like shopping is delightful for a lot of people in a lot of moments, right? And so they're not trying to fully outsource that, right? Like you know that's why I try to distinguish between what feels like something which may be a chore at times and what feels like something which is delightful. Similarly I think you know it could be in news it could be people have their trusted sources at least at Google through search and YouTube and through agents we think you know there will always be an incredible value from the ecosystem which users want to connect to and the agents should be in the job of doing that.
But you are right. There are times the agents are playing a role in the middle. Sometimes it's very good because you know it helps improve user satisfaction because users are getting to what they want in a better way. But there's a layer of abstraction too and that's what you're talking about.
But I think it's always been true with technology a bit but I don't think ultimately you know it's also at the same time it's also in the tools with which you can create content are also exploding so people will also be creating more content so I think there'll be a new balance which we will find but yeah it is an interesting moment of evolution.
Yeah, I like that. I think you're saying there's definitely going to be a strong place for agents to do that curation on our behalf, especially in the era of complete slop domination.
But also, you know, that feeling of exploration can still be there.
Because it's a fundamental human need that doesn't go away.
Yeah. Exactly. Okay. So speaking of the wild west and I know you're probably feeling this pretty strongly at Google there have been increasing cyber security cyber attacks the models are getting better at cyber obviously Google has been thinking about cyber security for decades are you seeing cyber attacks especially AI enhanced cyber attacks ramp up at Google?
Look we've been seeing being very clear like we've deeply cared about cyber you know because we've been working on frontier technologies for a while like Google pioneered many of important security frontiers like zero trust and so on right like you know we've worked hard to keep the company at the frontier and also we operate many products and platforms around the world that touch billions of people. We've been pretty aggressive in deploying agentic workflows. Our internal security teams use agentic workflows to help detect vulnerabilities and then how do you work to patch them? And we have steadily seen over the last two years as the model capabilities have progressed you know we are able to detect more vulnerabilities and we've been working very hard to patch them. I think Mythos was a point of inflection of capturing that moment in time. You know they put out a model which was really well built for that particular task and it was frontier there right but what we are excited about it is part of the reason we are sharing maybe one of the undermentioned announcements today at I/O is Code Mender. So Code Mender is a product which we use internally and which we're building to share externally. It not only helps you identify the vulnerabilities, generate patches, test and verify that they work and deploy them.
That's right. And like you know and real time we completed our recent acquisition of Wiz, you know. So Wiz is state-of-the-art in being able to do this realtime monitoring of vulnerabilities etc. So I think combination of what we have with Wiz and Code Mender I think we are using it internally to stay at the frontier and I think it's an important moment for the industry. I have to say I'm heartened by the cross industry collaboration going on at this moment. I think one of the examples I would call out today be it SynthID or watermarking companies coming together, companies coming together around cyber that is so important for this industry with this technology right so I'm encouraged by those trends as well.
So you mentioned Mythos so I want to talk about that for a moment obviously Anthropic decided not to release Mythos publicly just a handful of companies we have OpenAI releasing GPT 5.5 Cyber which approach do you think is more appropriate which is right for Google is it you know is there some model that is just too good and you're going to hold it back or is the more iterative deployment strategy that OpenAI takes more aligned with what Google believes?
I think it depends on where you we it depends on the model capability. If it is not fundamentally changing what's out there already in terms of the state-of-the-art, I think it's definitely okay to put it out. But in the security world, there's a well established practice. Google has done Project Zero for a long time, right? And like you know we have teams of people who find vulnerabilities then we notify the vendor give them 90 days to patch it before we acknowledge the vulnerability in the wide and so there are well-established practices in the security industry around how to do it. So I think it makes sense to me if you suddenly have something which dramatically changes the frontier. First of all, I think it's important to work closely with the government on that and you approach it in a responsible way. So I think that is consistent with how the security industry works and but I do think it's important to also make sure enough people get access to it so they can patch their systems and so on and they go hand in hand. So I think there's validity to that approach.
So is there some threshold by which you would say past that point we can't release it or is it more let's look at what the landscape of model capabilities are let's look at how cyber is right now and let's make the determination on a model basis?
That's what I would say like is the next one you're introducing does it dramatically change the frontier is it a 1 to 2% improvement over the current state-of-the-art or are you taking these 20% jumps. That's where the judgment comes in and I think that's how I would change my approach.
So on the topic of model strategy, something near and dear to my heart is open source. Basically Google and Nvidia are the only companies with a real open source model strategy nowadays. You know Google's model is smaller meant to run on edge devices. Why not release a large open-source frontier model?
