How Sundar Pichai Is Rethinking Google For The AI Era | Decoder

How close is Ed to replacing you as the CEO? I just think the CEO job is not that complicated. People are standing and telling about how AI could make a lot of jobs go away, right? And like, you know, why wouldn't you feel a sense of anxiety about it, right? And like, you know, I think those are deeper issues which we have to tackle as a society. Io ended with Denis Asavas, the CEO of DeepMind, coming out. He said, Google's cutting-edge research and products will help unlock AGI's incredible potential for the benefit of the entire world. When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity. Can you tell me what it means to be in the foothills of the singularity? Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in a conversation we recorded just after the Google I.O. developer conference. This is the fifth year Sundar and I have sat down after I.O., and it's become one of my favorite Decoder traditions. There's always a lot of news at I.O., and this year was no exception. Google has powerful new Gemini models, it's putting AI agents in everything, and it's making huge changes to search on both the web and YouTube that will once again reshape the information ecosystem. That's a lot to talk about, and Sundar and I got into all of it. But I also realized that it's been a long time since I'd asked Sundar the Decoder questions about structure and decision-making. So I started there. You'll hear Sundar say he realized he needed to rethink how Google worked a few years ago in response to the chat GPT. And he made a lot of executive changes and big decisions to get the company in a more aggressive posture. That's exciting, but it seems likely to yet again change the dynamics of the open web. If you're a Decoder listener, you know that I coined the term Google Zero a few years ago. That's the idea that Google traffic to websites would fall to zero as the company answered more and more queries directly on the search results page. That's gone from an idea that Sundar batted away in previous interviews to something that the entire media industry is grappling with. The CEOs of major publishers like Conde Nast are now publicly saying they're planning for a world of zero search traffic from now on. Google is also training its models on YouTube videos and changing YouTube search to summarize and index videos so they get dropped directly into the relevant parts. That's sure to cause some creator angst. So I asked Sundar if he's ready to fight the same battles with YouTubers as he currently is with publishers. Finally, I had to ask Sundar about Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis ending the IEO keynote by saying that we are at the foothills of the singularity. It's no surprise that Sundar agrees with Demis, but his thoughts on the timeline to AGI are worth paying attention to. Like I said, this is one of my favorite episodes to do every year because Sundar is always game to actually take the questions and even look at search results on my phone with me. I think you're really going to like this year's conversation. OK, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google. Here we go. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet and of Google. Welcome back to Decoder. Oh, it's great to be here. Nice to see you again, Nila. Yeah, this is one of my favorite yearly conversations. I think we've done it almost five times. Wow. I quite didn't realize it's been five times, but I enjoy it. Thanks again. Yeah. I want to start with a little bit of a lightning round. I was thinking about this. We've talked a lot. We always get deep into the weeds of the web and search and big, heady ideas. And I realize I have not asked you the decoder questions in quite some time. And I was just looking back at our previous conversations and Google itself. You've made quite a lot of changes to Google. I think a number of your direct reports have changed over time. You've obviously restructured DeepMind platforms and devices and Android has been restructured itself. Tell me how Google is structured right now. OK, it is Google and Alphabet. You know, obviously we have Alphabet as well. But broadly, I think about it as, you know, there are three main businesses in Google. Search, YouTube, Google Cloud. There are enormous platforms we run, which is Android, Chrome and the whole area to do with it. And powering it all is all these important technology areas, which is AI and infrastructure work. And then you have the functions to go with it. But at a high level, you can think of it as, you know, Search, YouTube, Google Cloud and then our big computing platforms. Those are the main groups and obviously powered with Google DeepMind and our infrastructure teams. So that's one simple way to get a mental model around it. And of course, we have other bets beyond that, Waymo being the most prominent of them all. But there are many, many other bets like Isomorphic Labs and so on. Yeah, I want to stay focused on the Google of it. I feel like we could do an entire hour on Alphabet and how that's structured and how that works as a public company with many bets. But just to stay focused on Google for one second. The knock on Google historically is this is a company that ships lots and lots of products. You can't sell lots of products. There's not tons of focus. There's like thousands of names of different products that are overlapping in kinds of different ways. And where that comes from, at least in my view, is that you do have these big infrastructure bets. You have all these capabilities and the people running the businesses can use those capabilities to spin up products. And there's maybe not a lot of overlap or central planning on like, did we launch two of the same thing? How do you resolve that tension? It does seem like Google has gotten a little more focused, but that is the company's culture, right? We're going to make a lot of bets and see which ones work. How does that resolve for you? Look, I think there's a lot of intent in what we do, too. I think it's not an accident. You know, we have 13 products with a billion users each, and we've been as committed to those products longer term. You know, you can go back and think about when Gmail launched or Maps launched or Google Docs launched or Search launched or Chrome launched. And like, you know, we've been deep and consistent in many, many areas over a long period of time as well. I do think one way I've internalized in the AI moment is for the first time we have such a common infrastructure powering all of them with our Gemini models and the underlying AI infrastructure. So we are more able to intently, you know, with intent, do things which cut across things, right? So personal intelligence is a great example of it. It's one effort. Obviously, users get a choice to turn it on in each of the products, but it's built with one common infrastructure so that it works consistently across your products. The underlying Gemini models itself is an example of it. So we are able to bring that model in the context of the products, like ask Maps in the context of, you know, the Maps product. But a lot of the technology powering it, the voice stack, the model, the intelligence, is all one work. So which is why I think the AI moment offers us a new, really new way to think about it and not just across Google, across Alpha, but two over time. I think that's what makes this moment so uniquely powerful is that you can invest so much in R&D and infrastructure and develop a technology which then you can apply across all these areas, you know, obviously in a context in which they are useful for users. But the underlying technology platform is common. So there's a lot of intent that way and so on. You have to give room for innovation. Otherwise, so allowing room for innovation where teams on the margin are able to ship some new features. Sometimes you later work to harmonize them. Take Notebook, Notebook LM, and Notebooks are now showing up in Gemini, right? And like, you know, you know, it's effectively projects as Notebooks and you can create a Notebook in Gemini, you can go to Notebook LM, you will see the same Notebooks, vice versa. So that's an example of where you innovate at first and then you're harmonizing later. I was watching the keynote yesterday and I saw a lot of intent and confidence from Google. We we have this core technology. We can express it in lots of ways. It's still essentially Googly, like there's lots of products, lots of Gemini words. I'm going to figure them all out. I promise. I would contrast the three, four years ago when, you know, there was the chat GPT moment. Everyone worried about what Google would do. Could OpenAI show up and take your market share and search away. Between that and now, you have changed Google, right? You have restructured it. There are new people in leadership roles. Connect those dots for me. How did you think about, OK, I need to actually change how the company works with the competitive moment you were in that got you here? That's a great question. Look, I think for me, I always internalized that moment. It was tough to convey it outside. But I was, you know, we had set the company, you know, I pivoted the company to be AI first. We had all the ingredients. In some ways, I felt like the Overton window had changed. People were adopting these technologies faster than we had expected. And so to me, it was a way to go and actually express ourselves through our products. But I realized we had to organize ourselves for it. And going back to my earlier point, I realized we need a core models and a core infrastructure team to power everything we are doing across Google. So a lot of my initial energy was to go set that up. One AI team, we had world class research teams in brain and deep mind, bringing that together as Google DeepMind, you know, which was harder than it sounds because it's like saying, go put Stanford and MIT together and create a department out of it or a university out of it. So I think doing that well. And then at that time, I also set up with Amin Vedhat, who is our SVP of AI infrastructure now, a centralized infrastructure team, which has paid great dividends. And then another evolution was realizing we need a chief AI architect to kind of architect this technology across Google and Cori, you know, taking on that role as well. So those were important changes. We obviously made sure search needed to move faster. So search was split across many leaders, pulling it under Elizabeth Reed with Nick Fox being responsible for the overall area. Josh Woodward coming to help with our labs product and working on Gemini later, driving innovation, as well as, you know, obviously have extraordinary leaders in the company, other leaders like Philip Schindler, who runs all our operations and so on. So it is stepping back and end to end thinking about the structure and make sure we are set up well for this moment where we need to move faster as a company, which meant we needed to make faster decisions. I set up these new product reviews once a week. These were, you know, they were AI product reviews, making sure we are intentful about how we apply this technology, where we apply them and wanted to review everything firsthand, that anything to do with AI, which we were shipping to users, went through that channel. And I spent time directly with whoever was working on it. Yeah. The other Decoder question I ask everybody is about decisions. You're describing a lot of big decisions, some of them uncomfortable as you change people around. How do you make decisions? What's your framework? A big part of my framework is over time understanding that there are very, very few decisions which are really consequential and most decisions aren't. So what matters much more is that you make the decision, because that's what determines the velocity of an organization. And so the more you're able to make those decisions and keep the company moving forward, you're generally better off. Of course, there are a few decisions like combining and setting up Google DeepMind. Those are more consequential and you want to take your time deliberating and doing it. But a lot of decision making is about just making them. And so the more you're able to do that, you do develop over time some pattern matching and some intuition for you've seen a version of the problem before. And so I think it's good to rely on that and separate the signal from the noise so that the signal is that this is a really important decision and you want to really deliberate around it versus this is just, you know, it may look big, but it is more a normal course of action you need to take. Yeah, I'm looking around the industry. Your peers in big tech have some of the wildest org chart ideas I've ever heard in my entire life. I think Meta wants to have 50 engineers report to a single manager with the power of agents. Jack Dorsey at Block wants all 6,000 people to report to him. Are you having similar thoughts that you should invent some of the craziest org charts with AI ever? Look, I think leaders and people are incredibly important. And I think our companies, it depends on what the company, some companies have a much more narrower suite of products. And so, you know, different structure may work when you're running something at the scale of take the scale of Google Cloud. Right. I think it's important that there is a CEO in charge and we are serving all the top enterprises in the world at a scale. You know, and so how do you how do you set up for that? So I think I think I think great leaders end up mattering a lot like we have Thomas there. So I do think I think think about it. What I do think about it is how how are we using AI more effectively? And we have seen the transition internally, particularly amongst our developers, where we have transitioned from using AI tools to assist coding to, you know, them, a portion of the engineers working, directing teams of agents effectively more and more. And so I think those are those are transitions underway. And I think that will flow beyond just engineering into the rest of the organization. It's all it's already happening. Like even the work we are doing in Gemini Spark is to give that superpower to the hands of consumers, what you can do with these agent workflows, et cetera. So I'm more focused on making sure we are actually deploying that capability in a native way and that it's working well, because for us, it's more than just making the company efficient because it's the products we provide to others. Right. So I look at it with a very different lens. How we do it internally is what we are giving to users outside. We use antigravity internally. That's what we are providing outside. So the agents and antigravity is what our developers are using. And so that's what we are trying to put outside. So it has that extra dimension to it. The number one question Dakota listeners want me to start asking CEOs is to ask it straightforwardly. How close is Ed to replacing you as the CEO? No, it is today, you know, still, I just think the CEO job is not that complicated. Right. You know, it is it is not complicated. There's a big there are aspects of it where I think it's going to be very, very helpful in terms of decision making. I joke around that partially joke around, which is like I've spent a lot of time allocating compute. And I'm like, well, that seems like the AI is going to make more rational choices over time because I deal with a lot of appeals and emotions as part of working through a process like that. So I think look everywhere what I see and which may be different to how I think. I think done correctly, these tools are going to kind of allow us to operate at the next level in everything we are doing. Like, you know, it's not like you won't do what you were doing before. You will start from a higher foundation. I wasn't there when, like, I don't know, spreadsheets rolled out to companies. Right. And like I almost have to go think back, how did people do all this financial analysis before? Right. And I'm sure it changed over a period of three to four years fundamentally. And we got used to it. I think agents, et cetera, is a version of it. It's not like you're not going to plan birthday parties. It is just that, you know, what you let's say you're planning a trip somewhere, maybe you're actually spending your time thinking about the actual things you want to do with your time versus chasing opening times and how to get tickets and and so on. So I think it elevates everything to a different, different foundation is how I think about it. Let me ask you about that. And agents, some of those demos are fascinating. The idea that the search is going to build custom software for everybody. That seems like an idea in software engineering, a first impression, right? The idea that the computer, you're going to ask it a question and the response will be for it to make you software that helps you get to an answer. I'm fascinated by this idea. But that is fundamentally changing search. And then you kind of look at Gemini Spark, which is your agent platform in the cloud where you will say, go book me some tickets and Spark might run around and book you some tickets or do some tasks for you. And then there's antigravity, the agentic coding platform. Broadly, every year there's like a new paradigm for AI, right? There was LLMs first and then maybe we're going to chain some LLMs together and there's reasoning. And then now we're agents. Is this the foundation or is there another paradigm shift to come? I think it's a great question. We are laying most of the building blocks in place, I think. I think fundamentally being able to reason, use tools and code are a lot of like having intelligence and reasoning, being able to plan, being able to look up things, use tools. And if you need as part of that to build something. So you are kind of laying all the primitives and obviously antigravity is for developers, but the antigravity engine, the agentic harness is built into Gemini now, right? And Spark is just a mode of Gemini. Over time, it's a feature. You're positioning it, but it's just a tab within Gemini. And so you're bringing that agentic harness. Users don't need to think about it, developers will understand it. Over time in Spark, they can code powerful things. But as users, you may be building something, creating something, planning a trip. And all that is working behind the scenes. So I do think we are laying a lot of the primitives of what we need agents to work end to end, or more importantly, AI to work. You know, this long running vision of Assistant we've all had and worked through myriad forms of it and failing to fully do it well. I think we are closer than ever before to deliver on that promise. We haven't delivered it yet, but that's the journey which I think is closer than ever before. I look at all the products and they do seem like they should converge, right? You have the new intelligence search box. And I definitely want to talk about search in more detail. But you look at that search box and then you look at, well, it's Canvas that makes you the apps, but you're planning a wedding and it'll just make you an app to help you plan a trip or a wedding or something. And then you have Spark where it can go off and do things. And I looked at that and I was talking to people yesterday and it just seems obvious that that should be one product. It will. The agents, just like I gave the earlier notebook example of like, you're creating notebooks. What are notebooks? You're effectively putting all the context you want in one place and then working off it. It's folders, as they've always existed for people. And notebooks should be a consistent primitive across the Google products you use. I just view agents that way. It shouldn't matter. And so I do think when you're at the earliest stage of innovation, you create the capability. I think teams are experimenting with it. But for a user over time, if you fire off planning a trip, it should work across both places is how I think about it. You're right in that. There's something very important about Google search. It is a source of truth for people for however many years, decades now that go Google it and you'll get an answer. And that answer is the same for you and me generally has been a very important idea. Like I think a fixture in the culture. Maybe Google is the last company saying it will just tell you the truth out of all the companies out there. Okay, we're going to infinitely personalize the search box. We're going to infinitely personalize the search experience and we're all going to get different answers to queries. We're all going to maybe even look at different interfaces depending on what we're asking, what our personal context is, how much data Google has. Do you think about that profoundly? Like how much can you destabilize the last sort of common source of truth most people experience on the Internet? Look, I think there are factors well beyond our control, which is people today have a wider variety of sources than ever before. So I think people are getting content from so many different sources. But within the world of Google, I still think we deeply care about this being a source of knowledge and information. I think there are objective experiences and subjective experiences. What's the capital of the USA? It's not going to be custom created for anyone. These are objective things. Help me plan a nice trip to Montreal for a weekend. Naturally, the answers don't need to be the same for everyone. So there is a continuum there. I do think the more, you know, so we deeply care about, you know, for certain categories of information, we do still anchor around authoritative information to present as much of an objective view as possible. And if it is health related queries, we naturally tend to show more authoritative answers than if you're saying, you know, what sweater should I go buy? Yeah. Can I show you a search result? A few years ago, I showed you a search result. I've been tracking this one for years. I always love amongst the 10 trillion queries. Yes. Well, this is a very scientific, statistical way of doing this. I think that's important. And I want to get into how consumers might be experiencing these products. So this is a search I just do all the time for best Chromebook. I'll just show it to you. There it is. So it starts with an AI overview, which is very confidently tells you the answer. And then there's a bunch of sponsored boxes. And then the one that gets me is right below that. I believe the result is Reddit. And it has a top result in Reddit. It's actually a different answer than the AI overview. And then there's like the Times, which has a different answer. And you kind of scroll this, you know, like the AI overview is telling me one thing. The first organic result is like fairly down the page. And all of these are different answers. And I hear what you're saying about objective results and subject results. What laptop should I buy is somewhere in the middle of those things. Right. And I'm just curious how you think that experience for consumers is today in AI mode and where you think it should go. Look, I think to be very clear, in the world of AI overviews and AI mode, we are organizing, giving context, but there are sources throughout. So you're still presenting organic content in a different way. Right. So, I mean, there are links and sources you're giving to. But there is an opinion to go with it too, which is what you're talking about. I do think, you know, some of this will be iterative with users, right? I think one of the great things we find with search is it's easy to measure user satisfaction. For 25 years, we've learned to measure user happiness, user satisfaction in a correlated way with improving the quality of the product, not for short term. So that's why we do these long term studies. And if we get wrong or get any experience wrong, it shows in the metrics and we course correct. Yeah. Right. And we pride on the ability to track this over longer term, be it engagements, sessions, you know, returning to a topic, the number of bouncebacks they do. So very, very sophisticated way of looking at it. I think in some areas like that, I think the experience will continue to evolve. You're right. That experience is good today. I think it's probably more opinionated than it should be for the particular query you showed me. That's how that was my reaction as a user. Right. So I think that's a scope for improvement is how I would say in a fast evolving space. And, you know, but I would expect that to happen in the product, right? Like my intuition there is, oh, that's way more opinionated. There is some chance that's personalized to, you may be testing it in a way that you're uniquely personalizing. You are the reason that query might not be exactly representative, though. I think, I think because I know how you review all these things, like, you know, so there is some chance you're on the 0.0001%. This is kind of why I'm asking about infinitely personalizable results. Right. And I'm also asking if the experience is good, because I would bet that most people experience AI in Google search, like all the time they have that experience or they kick to AI mode and there's a stuff you can measure about user satisfaction. And then there's how the public feels about AI. And I think there's a pretty yawning gap in, Hey, there's these user numbers going up and we're close to a billion users and the free products people are experiencing, how good they might be. And then just the polling data, young people dislike AI is as objective as that gets. You can go ask them and they will tell you in measurable ways. They dislike it. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, booed at a college graduation speech. He was giving seven and 10 Americans opposed data center construction. There's some gap between the product experiences people are having and how they feel about the technology. Do you think you can close that gap? Do you think these products are good enough? I think it is a very profound topic and I feel like you're linking the two things. I think people's people rightfully. So yeah, it's the most profound technology, uh, uh, humanity's going to deal with. It's happening at a very fast pace. Uh, I don't think humans are evolved for processing this much change and the rate of change, particularly over the last few years is, uh, you know, incredibly high. And people rightfully. Particularly with all the, what they are hearing. I think people are, people are trying to understand the future and in the personal context of their lives, including, you know, what it means at an economic level and so on. Right. And so to me, really makes sense why there is anxiety around this technology. Um, and, and I think we should be very attuned to that. And I think that's an important topic. And I think that's much broader and bigger than the facets of what's happening. You know, people don't directly associate these two all the time in some cases. Yes. They're linked in certain ways. Well, can I, I think people experience the free versions of these models and various products. I think they open their social media feeds and they see slop. I think they see headlines about all that stuff. I think they have the tools just sort of presented to them. The Gemini sparkle shows up in all the Google products, whether you're a password or not. And then I do think you link it to, oh, they're asking for a lot of electricity and maybe my rates will go up and maybe all the jobs will go away. And that's pretty scary. And I, I don't know if the value exchange is there. I think these are good things to study. I think you're being too specific on what's happening versus I'm just broadening it out and saying that might be part of the explanation. I do think there are other cheaper factors too. Do you think it's just a marketing problem? I've heard your peers say that AI just has a marketing problem. No, I don't think so. That's the point I'm making. I'm in fact, arguing against it. I think it makes sense to me why people would feel consense about it. It feels natural to me. You know, your people are standing and telling about how AI could make a lot of jobs go away. Right. And like, you know, why wouldn't you feel a sense of anxiety about it? Right. And like, you know, I think those are deeper, deeper issues, which we have to tackle as a society. That doesn't mean, yes, there's concern about AI slop at a product level. All that are true. All I'm pointing out is it's a multilayered problem, but I don't think all the source of the data center is directly related to one specific experience you're having in a product or something alone like that. That's all the point I'm making. It is broader and bigger than that. I do think there's a lot of AI slop out there. Like I feel it. And so, you know, in an early phase of technology with the competitive dynamic that exists, I think a lot of things are getting rolled out. But we also see empirically how people are using these products in very deep ways. And, and, and, you know, I think not all of it is. If you go in a place where Waymo hasn't come and you just pull people, talk about self-driving cars, what you get in the polls is different from how they feel when they use these cars. So technology also goes through these things. People have pretty negative views of the internet too, by the way, if you go poll, right? If you ask about the internet as you know, and, and, but it's a fabric of our lives and we have to adapt to it. So all of that is simultaneously happening. I think it's a complex topic. To me, it feels like people are worried about rising energy prices. And if so, they want to make sure these AI is not exacerbating the problem. Right. And that's a valid concern. And I think and it's up to us as an industry to make sure if you're building data centers, what can we do to make sure we aren't contributing to that problem? So I think that I viewed as our responsibility, not just us and, and the government, I think, you know, there's bipartisan concerns around some of this stuff. So for example, there's a rate player, a rate payer pledge. We all signed up to with a set of commitments. Maybe there needs to be more done. I think all of that is goes, goes hand in hand. I think it's important to talk about topics like skilling, workforce, you know, adaptations. I think we are driving a lot of change very fast through society. I think those end up being very important topics as well. So I think, I think there's concerns at all those levels and I expect those concerns to be meaningful as we go forward. I think it is, you know, many years ago, I said, this is more profound than fire or electricity. So you've always felt that. And so, you know, or think about deep fakes and how do you know what, whether something is, you know, these models are getting better at simulating reality. This is why we were working so hard. We built Synth ID, we are open sourcing it. We are pulling many, many partners together. And it's great for me to see the industry collaborate on a topic like this. Cyber security is another good example. I think these are all real concerns, right? So I do think as an industry, we need to do more. Governments will have a stronger role to play. So all of that, and the public needs to be involved. You cannot have the most consequential technology rolling out to the world in a way in democracies without the public citizens rightfully having a voice around it. Yeah. So to me, it is really important that we go through this phase and like, you know, that's how we learn how to adapt. Yeah. I'll leave it. I think my argument is that the products do the marketing work and that that's my push. I'm still waiting to see that the killer app for consumers that does it. I think we have the killer app for enterprise. I want to talk about the web though, before I burn all of it. There are times I've gone through a health journey in Gemini. It feels more than a killer app to me. Yeah. Better than anything I've ever done before. So, you know, so I think it's, you know, so people are going through those experiences too. Yeah. I want to talk about the web. The, you know, the health journey in Gemini that requires a rich data set of health information on the web to exist. VO requires, I believe you're training Gemini and like YouTube videos, right? Like VO requires the YouTube ecosystem to operate and to be fruitful, to make new work in. You and I have discussed the concept I call Google zero for many years. The idea that you will stop sending traffic to the web. You've disagreed with me, but this is real. Very much so. This last week. It hasn't happened in the last many years. Well, I'm just going to read you a quote. It's this time. It's not me. And I, I didn't, I didn't feed this to him, but Roger Lynch, the CEO of Condé Nast, he did an interview with TV pan last week, and he said, I'm just gonna read a quote every year. A search traffic was down more than we had forecast. So last year I told our teams, assume there is no search. You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero. That is Google zero. Condé Nast is saying we're assuming that search will go to zero. How would you respond to that? Right. The idea of one of the biggest, most iconic publishers in the world is saying, I can't depend on this anymore. Look, first of all, the information ecosystem is so much broader beyond Google, by, by far, we see it in the data. You see it, uh, everywhere. So if any publisher over the last 10 years, I would look at Verge and I would say where you were when you first took over, how much it's evolved since then, the types of content you make, where all you put that content out, how all you users are coming to you. I think it's exceptionally dynamic. And so it makes sense to me. Every publisher is adapting to this new world. We are, you know, adapting to the evolving world, how users are consuming technology we had to do when the world shifted from web to mobile. Uh, we are shifting it from a world of mobile to, uh, people having ongoing conversations, chatting with these products, talking to them, consuming it and voice and, you know, many different form factors, uh, people are expressing preferences for various types of content. They are looking for user generated content. They're looking for podcasts. Uh, you know, they, they're looking for that. Through it all, we are very committed to, uh, both meeting user expectations and also getting them to connecting them to what's out on the web. And just even in the last year, even since we've launched these features, we've gone back, we've added more links. Another area where the behavior is changing, many publishers, rightfully so, are thinking what subscription models. But I'm just saying, Condé Nast is saying, we're going to assume our search traffic is zero, given the trends that we see, should they assume that? This is, you know, I always view people understand their business is better. I mean, I, I'm not in a position to tell, uh, you know, such iconic publisher, what they should think about their business or plan, uh, you know, if they are building content, which is high quality and people like it, I expect us to be, to reflect that in our products that much I can commit to them. So that's, that's what my, my, you know, so, but I think more than any other company through this evolution, we are working very hard to make sure people can get connected and we are planning to do it in search and Gemini, and that's still underpins a lot of what we do, but there is evolution, like as a technology improves, low quality clicks get filtered out. That's a natural evolution. We see, we see it in our metrics, bounce clicks are going down. And so those are all dynamics and people are going to a wider array of information. So, you know, and, and, and there are more people producing information than ever before. So that pie is growing faster than, so all these dynamics are happening. It's a complex ecosystem, but our commitment to, you know, making sure we reflect the vastness and diversity of the content. And we do think people want to connect ultimately to the sources and, but we are trying to meet them in those moments. And people come with very different intent and very different moments. One of the small features we have done, but very important, I think, is if you've subscribed to something, reflect that as a preferred source for you as a user, but that's a new change, which we didn't have before. We are adapting to the fact that publishers are increasingly, you know, turning to subscribe offerings too. Publishers, YouTube creators, should they be able to opt out of training to get surfaced in search? I mean, this is a much broader topic. I do think, you know I think both laws and regulations will have to evolve. The courts will have to be in. It's important to protect copyright. It's important to protect fair use. And, you know, and so, you know, these are constructs which will evolve dynamically through that. But do you want to be in a bunch of lawsuits with YouTube creators? You're in a lawsuit with publishers in the UK, the rhetoric in that lawsuit is getting increasingly heated. Google has said that the proposed solution is a quote, free writer charter. Every year, the News Media Association sends me a quote to read to you. And, you know, they say, Google calling us free writers is obviously ridiculous in its basic supply chain economics. If the value were really all on Google's side, they would simply allow publishers to opt out. Do you want to be in that same fight with a bunch of creators on YouTube about opting out? Look, we are constantly, you know, as part of Gemini developing, you know, we did offer a new opt out with Google Extended, and we are in conversations with publishers. We'll take feedback and over time, you know, work through what makes sense. And right. You know, obviously it is a, we are not the only player in a big ecosystem. Uh, you know, we are also trying to put out products which are competitive to other products out there. Right. And I think, uh, all the publishers will also write an article saying the product is not very, you know, so it is more complicated than it looks. I just, I think you have spent more time thinking about the web and the health of the web and the necessity of the web to paint me the picture for what a healthy web looks like. You know, I actually find tick search world. One of the arguments I've made over time, and I actually see it playing around a little bit more. I've started using the web more again over the last year, year and a half. I think all these AI experiences have brought the web back more. You know, there was a time and it felt like, you know, but I always felt the web would be vibrant. In fact, I've argued the web is going to be vibrant every year. And, you know, I would still argue it today. Uh, you know, the web is constantly evolving. I've never seen anything as dynamic as the web, which is why it's been such a privilege to be part of that evolution. I look at agents, that is the next evolution of the web, which we will deal with and, you know, and I think it will evolve the web pretty profoundly. Um, and there will be a lot of debates about what's okay, what's not. And, uh, but I think the web will continue to be, people want to put out information, connect with other people. Uh, people want to be connected. Uh, you know, people aren't trying to be in a siloed world detached that doesn't reflect the reality of the human experience. I think the web is going to play as central a role on, on it as ever before. In fact, the universal commerce protocol, if anything, what we announced yesterday, I think people slightly are underestimating the impact of it. Can I juxtapose that? There are a lot of muscular announcements about new products, new features, and agentic tools you can use and UCP and Amazon and Walmart, and we're going to use a new standard we're building for shopping. And all that is very tangible. And then IO ended with Dennis Asavis, the CEO of DeepMind coming out. And he said this thing that I have not been able to stop thinking about. He said, Google's cutting edge research and products will help unlock AGI's incredible potential for the benefit of the entire world. When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity. Can you tell me what it means to be in the foothills of the singularity? Dennis and I have had long, deep conversations on this topic. I think in this context, I think for him, the advent of AGI is what he thinks of as the singularity. And, you know, and I, do you have a definition of AGI? Have you debated, do you have an agreement? We, we, we debated a lot. I think both Dennis and I are very close to how we think about and, uh, you know, think about, we think about AGI and, uh, you know, in, uh, there is a harder definition of AGI, which is, you know, that, uh, that it has to be more comprehensively do, uh, you know, the wide range of tasks, including cognitive tasks, uh, in a way that's comparable. So I think we'll, at some point actually put it out as a company, I think, and we are working on that, but I think that that's what he's talking about in this context, by the way, I think it's important for us to understand that this technology is progressing very rapidly. And, you know, later today, I'll be going and spending time with our AI researchers and not just in, in, in our company, but amongst the frontier labs. I think there's wide consensus that this technology, you know, AGI is, uh, people may quibble around like, you know, is it like three years, but the technology is sooner rather than later. And so I think it's more important to communicate that because that's what, you know, to an earlier part of the conversation, it's important that we as a society understand it and are preparing as much as possible. I asked you this question that maybe the first time we ever talked to AI, uh, I asked you if language was intelligence and, you know, the, the, the progression here is we're layering more and more on LMS. We're doing longer chains of reasoning. We're building harnesses. We're, we're doing all this stuff. And the, but the core technology is still, you know, transformers. It's still the thing Google invented all so long ago. Can LLMs get you to AGI? Is that path clear? You know, the, the trajectory over the last three years has been incredible and looking ahead, uh, you know, it looks, the LLMs of today are, you know, have evolved in many ways too. So we are constantly evolving it. And, and to me, it's like asking, like, can computers get us to like the way, you know, the Von Neumann architecture is still what powers most computers today. You know, he wouldn't recognize the modern, uh, one of our TPU parts. Right. And like, or maybe he would be, you know, there's still a lot of commonality to it. So I think the underlying technology keeps evolving so profoundly. Um, I look at every year we've had major breakthroughs. I recently, I mean, you just saw his demo in antigravity and ability to prompt and create an operating system, right. And like, you know, it's very dangerous for Google to be able to make new operating systems. We'll have to, we'll have to make sure we don't talk to Max on creating. Uh, I'll give you that. Uh, it's fair, but, but, you know, that is the power of what these things are doing, right? There are the top mathematicians in the world, top physicists in this world who are interacting with these tools and using them, uh, in important ways. But we still, you know, can these tools go fundamentally make novel scientific discoveries on their own? Not yet. Right. And so it's both remarkable how much it's progressed. Um, I do think it has, uh, uh, uh, important evolutions to happen. And then there are strong opinions out there in the world about, you know, uh, you know, you know, how, how much of a real understanding of the world you need, uh, you know, to, to, to, to take that next leap, you know, I am, I'm pretty optimistic that we will continue to make a lot of progress. Yeah. All right. So give me the last question. What is your timeline? Is it three years, five years AGI? Where are you at? You know, I have always answered it this way. I think that timeline doesn't matter because the rate of progress means you're dealing with ever more intelligent systems in a profound way. So the way I would answer that question, I, three years from now, whether you and I call it AGI or not, doesn't matter because it will be very, very powerful and we have to prepare for it. Yeah. Sunil, this was great. Thank you so much for the time yet again. Thanks a lot. Pleasure. I'd like to thank Sunil Pichai for taking time to join me on Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads or blue sky. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll see you next time.