You know, agents are going to be a fundamental part of how we work. Because having used them, you know, for 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, 2 years ago most developers started using these tools. They started giving them more and more auto completions and you were accepting them, etc. But for the last few months, developers are actually doing agent workflows, right? The developers on the frontier. And they are actually deploying agents, orchestrating agents. You saw the demo at Andreessen Horowitz building an OS, you were effectively in an agent workflow. So, I think once you get the taste of using something like that and the superpower that comes with it, I think so. 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. That's an important foundation. 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? I mean, you're entertaining yourself, you're trying to do something meaningful at times, and you know, it depends on the shopping, what you're shopping for, you know, if it's your weekly groceries versus, you know, 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 your DMV license, right? So, you know, so that's how agents will separate it out in the future.
Yeah, and 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. So, 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, that the agents are deciding correctly what information that we should have.
Yeah. We are already, you know, you are doing a version of that kind of like if you use Gmail and there's a spam filter working on your behalf filtering spam. In some ways, you're like trusting an agent. It is an agent, right? Like, you know, not the way we think of agents today. So, I think you've always, you know, I look at it as working on Waymo, you're going 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. And people are willing to trust, but that's because we've done the work over time to demonstrate to people with the data, with how we have operated it, that it's fundamentally safe and it's freeing you up to enjoy the ride. And so, I think it's all depends on the value you deliver. Right? I think that's why I think 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's part, Gemini's part is actually very powerful under the hood, but we are taking the deliberate careful step of making it work with your first-party services, like Gmail, calendar, etc. before we expose third party with MVP and full computer use and browser use. Again, I can do all that, but we want to make sure users are in control and they feel comfortable. We're getting their feedback, improving the product as we give those capabilities.
You know, Sundar, if I'm crossing the street in a 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 would 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 the apps, and now even more so with agents. How do we account for that?
I think, look, people, in our experience with search and YouTube, YouTube is a great example, right? People have a sense of connection with 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. I mean, there are times they want to discover I'm on the market. And shopping is delightful for a lot of people in a lot of moments, right? And so, we're not trying to fully outsource that, right? Like, you know, that's why I tried 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 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 but I don't think ultimately, you know, it's also big and 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 smart domination. But also, you know, that feeling of exploration will 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 on the internet at Google. There have been increasing cybersecurity cyberattacks. The models are getting better at cyber. Obviously Google has been thinking about cybersecurity for decades. Are you seeing cyberattacks, especially AI enhanced cyberattacks ramp up at Google?
Look, we've been seeing to be very clear we have deeply cared about cyber 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. Everything we've worked hard to keep the company at the frontier. And also the operating products and platforms around the world that touch billions of people in this industry. 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've steadily seen over the last 2 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 Metamorphosis was a point of inflection of capturing that moment in time. You know, that they put out a model which was really, you know, well-built for that particular task and it was frontier ahead. Right? But what we are excited about is one of the reasons we are sharing giving one of the under mentioned announcements today at I/O 2023. So, Code Mentor 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. And it's right 24/7. 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 real time monitoring of vulnerabilities etc. So, I think combination of what we have and Wiz and Code Mentor, 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 would be 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 Meta, so I want to talk about that for a moment. Obviously, Anthropic decided not to release Meta publicly to 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?
Okay. I think it depends on where you feel 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 got Project Zero for a long time, right? And I, 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 wild. 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 what 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 it's valid to agree to that approach. So, is there some threshold by which you would say past that point we can't really say 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 by model basis. That's what I would say. 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 model 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?
Well, we, first of all, Google we've been big fans of open source. Google was built on a lot of open source systems. We have worked on many big things which are open source. We have personally worked on Chromium and Android and so on. Kubernetes and I can name many projects which Google has contributed pretty strongly to the world in open source. In AI we've been building Gemma models and we've been updating them year after year, right? And they're awesome. And I think the recent release of Gemma 4 was a great release and you know, so we are pushing it. I think all of us are trying to make sure the frontier takes a lot of investment to get the frontier done. I think you've seen our CAPEX dollars, right? And like you know, so you're putting a lot of R&D dollars to generate those incremental frontier models. So I think and you're discovering new techniques as part of doing those models. So we all have to be mindful of that. But I think we're also committed to making sure there's an open source ecosystem which is able to develop. And so we take a balanced approach there. And I think we'll continue to take that balanced approach. That's how I see it.
Yeah. And by the way, I do love the Gemma models. I've run them locally, they are fantastic. So definitely thank you. You know, obviously a company with the size and the resources of Google, if you're making that decision of okay, large closed source, large open source, we can't do both. Probably most startups in the US also will struggle with that decision. So you're looking at what is your sense of the business model for open source in America? Is it viable right now?
First of all, we already do open source part of it is in the investment so much in the flashlight and flash models is so that they're giving a range of options, right? And those models are workhorses, too. So your question on open source, it's not that we don't, you know, we've been moving the open source frontier, too. There's a lot of very good open source models, like particularly from China which startups are adopting to. Yeah, we had talked about that. So you know, I think it depends, right? You go through moments in technology where the frontier moves so maybe sometimes the open source may not be able to fully keep up with it. But then there are moments where open source will take leaps if the technology curve slows down or, you know, takes a break, right? So, it's tough to predict it fully in the future. But I expect there to be a demand for a strong open source ecosystem. And I think we will definitely play a part in it and I hope others do too.
