Great to see everybody once again. Hope you've had a really interesting, thought-provoking day. I hope you've learned a lot of things and heard a lot of things that you can take with you back to your companies. And I also hope that you've had a lot of opportunities to talk to each other and learn from everybody's experience here. That is one of the things that we always try to encourage at Fast Company, the cross-pollination of ideas at events like this. So I am really, really excited to be here today with Ruth Porat who you just saw introduced on that video. Ruth is both the president and CIO, chief investment officer of Alphabet and Google. We're going to talk mostly today about her capacity as president of the company, but we'll touch a little bit on her CIO roles as well. So, I want to start with a question about some very big news that is coming out of Google today that those of you who have spent any time on your phones today have probably started to see trickling out of Google IO, the big developer conference that is happening as we speak out west. And Ruth has been kind enough to join us here today while Sundar holds down the fort there. So, Ruth, what do you think are the most significant, and I know it's hard to pick your children, but the most significant announcements coming out of the event today and how will that affect those of us in the audience here today, both from a personal user standpoint and also more of a work lives and corporate standpoint.
Well, first, it's great to be here. Great to be with you and everyone here. I think what's most exciting about IO is that we firmly are saying and you're seeing that Gemini is in the agentic era. We've pushed what we're doing with Gemini, announced Gemini 3.5 Omni which is the ability to really ingest any form of content and we show today what you can then create with videos. You actually have to see it I think to believe it. But then really the opportunities that come across our platform. So for me one of the most exciting things is seeing what's happening with search and we think this is the biggest evolution of search ever. I think what is really exciting is we're now today we have or we are announcing that we've reached a billion monthly average users on AI mode and people are just using it differently, different ways, probably hopefully everyone here is engaging in different ways where you can go deeper and now adding capabilities. So it's a pretty long list but you see the Gemini applied to YouTube, to photos, to docs across the board and what that enables each of us to do to be more productive and more creative, kind of to push the frontier. And then I think the other part that's really exciting, it's a long answer because there's a lot and I know and we're only just going through it. It's been a lot of work and we're really excited to be here. It's mostly the momentum that we're seeing across the platform, but it's also the work to protect on the downside. Like we talk a lot as you know well that we want to be bold and responsible and so we're continuing to push what we're doing on things like SynthID which is the authentication something's been created with AI, want to make sure people are aware of that. We are also talking about something called Code Mender which is an extension of what we're doing in cyber security, it came out of Google DeepMind, the ability to identify cyber security vulnerabilities and patch. So a whole host of things on the upside and to protect.
So, one of the things that, and I, you know, again, I've been sort of following the news as I've been, you know, listening to sessions and talking to people today, but capex is a huge part of this, just the amount of...
It's gone up a tad. 2022 it was around 30 billionish and I saw a number recently that was maybe not quite 200 billion, but in the range. I'll show you one. You were CFO of Morgan Stanley. You were CFO of Google before your current roles. So talk to us about what does it feel like to spend that much money on something like this. There's all these good numbers about Google and I want to get into the sort of Google's surge where the company stands right now both from a metric standpoint but also from a narrative standpoint in the sort of battle of the big tech giants in the AI race which that position where the company stands is quite different than what the vibe was say 18 months ago or so. Before we get into that, talk to us about that capex and how you make those decisions. Do you and Sundar say this is going to cost more money than either one of us could previously have imagined but this is going to be the positive outcome. How do you guys do that?
It starts with a couple of basic kind of critical pillars which is one when you see platform shifts in particular something this profound we haven't seen anything this profound in our lifetime. You cannot miss platform shifts. You don't want to be behind the curve on this point number one. Point number two, when we look at the upside from AI, it is, we think, an incredible privilege to be living today when you're focused on what you can do with technology to advance science, drive economic growth, economic upside, improve delivery of critical social services, the advances in health care, in education, all that's necessary in cyber security and fortifying security. That upside potential is profound. And so to deliver it, we clearly need the compute capacity. If I go back maybe five years ago as we were starting to look at what the slope of these curves could be. We had conversations to your question about capital allocation which is to what end can you use this level of compute. And I think one of the very important lessons from the early days of Google and others is if you force too quickly to identify precisely where you'll get a return on an investment, you can get a quick tactical win, but that doesn't mean you're building for the long term and building for something that's actually going to matter. And so one of the key elements is how do you lift up and try and project out states of the world over a period of time? And what we're seeing even though it's still very early days on this journey is that we consistently talk about the biggest challenge is allocating the compute that we have. We are compute constrained given the opportunity and it's what we need internally. It's working with private sector, public sector. We see the upside to be quite extraordinary and we want to make sure that we're laying the groundwork and the foundation to be able to deliver on it. So we feel it's like I think to go into that level of growth you should have a certain level of anxiety and humility but we feel very firmly that missing this would really be the error that we cannot make.
And did you feel like you were missing it? I'm going to speak generally here about time and exactly when this was the case but obviously OpenAI had a lot of momentum following the release of ChatGPT. Microsoft's investment in OpenAI gave Microsoft a lot of momentum around that time. Google was caught flatfooted, let's say. I mean, that's the lead of Harry McCracken's story about Google that's in the most innovative companies issue. And Sundar cops to that and talks about it freely. I'd just be curious to hear, can you take us inside the company during that moment? On one hand, you all had been creating a lot of this technology and hadn't released it out of concerns that it wasn't ready for public usage yet because of hallucinations and other AI guardrails and safety issues. But that did cost the company, again, I want to emphasize from a narrative standpoint that did affect the stock price. It felt like Google was behind. That no longer feels that way. But what was that like? What kind of conversations did you have? And tell us the story of turning that around.
I think there's a really important point that you should never rely so greatly on the external assessment when you're either down or viewed as at the top. Because if you believe in your core strategy and plan, sure it's great to have external signals, but to stay focused and resolute on execution and to have when you're at the top to have a healthy level of paranoia and stay focused and resolute on execution is really key. And I think there were sort of two tensions going on. On the one hand, it was back in 2016 when Sundar said we are moving from mobile first to AI first. And what that means is we are going to invest aggressively to lead in AI and we're going to have a full stack approach which at the time, what is that full stack approach? Well, it's models, it's chips, it's research and it's the application across all of our platforms. And he was very clear and amongst the senior leadership team it was very clear we will invest to continue to lead and be AI first. You're absolutely right that one of the areas that we care immensely about is delivering for everyone in a high quality way and models were hallucinating and as Sundar I think talked about in the piece one of the questions was if you wake up in the middle of the night and your child has a fever and you want to give your child Tylenol it better be right and Google stands for quality. And so that to us was very important. But I think things don't happen overnight. And the position that we're in and the momentum that we have that we're really proud of and remain, I think, paranoid in a healthy way about is because we've invested against this for many years. You know, chips, TPUs, we've been investing in for more than a decade. Google Brain we created in 2011. Google DeepMind we acquired in 2014. So there's been a consistency about investing that I think has served us really well. One of the other elements though to your question is we took a look at what we could do organizationally to accelerate the pace at which we were operating. And I think just like anything in life, the world's not static. It's super dynamic. So we should be organic about this. And there were things that we did that eliminated, for example, some seams between organizations. We combined Google Brain and DeepMind to create Google DeepMind. And I think that sort of organizational alignment helps. We also did something that I think is really valuable. We have a group called Google Labs which I think Sundar spoke about as well which spins up ideas pretty quickly and is very quick to kill them if they don't make sense or to launch them where they do make sense. That's where NotebookLM was from. Hopefully everyone here has used both of those and more and continuing to come out of there. So that kind of ethos has been really key and then just staying resolute about it.
You mentioned when we talked before that your personal AI dashboard, this question has more to do with how you're using AI yourself to become more productive, more creative, more efficient and all of that. That using this dashboard frees you from sort of some administrative drudgery. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that and sort of what excites you most about that. What do you not have to do anymore that maybe you did have to spend more time on and what are some things that you're getting to do because of this that you didn't previously have either the time or the bandwidth to do.
So, I think one of the most exciting parts with AI is how we're going to reimagine what we're doing. It's the innovation that comes that's actually pushing the frontier. That's one core part of it. The operational effectiveness I view as sort of low-hanging fruit and it gets you on the journey and we should all be doing it. And so this kind of executive cockpit as we call it. My team found that they were spending a lot of time trying to ingest content from across Alphabet, ingest to make sure that they had the best of throughout. If we'd been working in a country, spent a lot of time around the globe with...
