How Sundar Pichai is rethinking Google for the AI era

Support for the show comes from Amazon. There are the things you can plan for. A first birthday party, a movie marathon, a renter friendly bathroom remodel. And then there are the things you can never plan for. A surprise rainstorm, a Blu-ray player calling it quits, stick-on tiles that looked way better on the package. For all things planned and unplanned, Amazon has you covered. You'll find low prices on everyday essentials and last-minute life savers. Shop Amazon and save on essentials. Save the everyday. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost? Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room, just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. And play! Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash collegePC. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief at 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 ChatGPT, and he made a lot of executive changes and big decisions to get the company in a more aggressive posture. Of course, we also talked about all of those search changes and how it seems obvious that the future of Google search is bringing things like the new intelligent search box together with Google's new Gemini spark agent platform so that searches can set off tasks, not just deliver results. 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 Condé 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 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 IO 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 gonna like this year's conversation. Okay, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google. Here we go. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet and of Google. Welcome back to Decoder. It's great to be here. Nice to see you again, Nilay. Yeah, this is one of my favorite yearly conversations. I think we've done it at ION almost five times. Wow. I quite didn't realize it's been five times, but I enjoyed it. Thanks again. Yeah, I wanna 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 heavy ideas. And I realized 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. Okay, 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 our 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 wanna 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 cancel 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 gonna 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 have been asked 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, so I've been, 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 you know, 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 Alphabet too 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. You know, notebooks are now showing up in Gemini, right? And like, 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 it 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 have this core technology. We can express it in lots of ways. It's still essentially Googley. Like there's lots of products, lots of Gemini words. I'm going to Our 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. Uh, we had world-class research teams in Brain and DeepMind bringing that together as Google DeepMind, you know, which was, you know, 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, with Amin Vadat, who's our SVP of AI infrastructure now, a centralized infrastructure team, which is, 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 Kori, you know, taking on that role as well. So those were important changes. Uh, we obviously, you know, made sure Search needed to move faster, so Search was split across many leaders. So pulling it under Elizabeth Reed with Nick Fox being responsible for the overall area. Josh Woodward coming to help with, uh, help at our labs product and working on Gemini later, driving innovation. As well as, you know, obviously I 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 uh who I was working on it. Yeah. We have a 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 uh 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. You know, 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, and so the more you're able to do that, you, you do develop over time uh some, some pattern matching and you know, some intuition for, you've seen a version of the problem before. And so I think it's good to rely on that and, 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 on 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. Uh 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? Um, look, I, I think leaders and people are incredibly important. And I think our company is, you know, it depends on what the company is. Some companies are, you know, 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, like, take the scale of Google Cloud, right? I think it's important that there is a CEO in charge and, you know, 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 already, 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 agentic workflows, etc. 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 anti-gravity internally. That's what we are providing outside. So the agents in anti-gravity 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 Decoder listeners want me to start asking CEOs is asked it straightforwardly. How close is AI to replacing you as the CEO? Uh, no, it is today, you know, still, I just think the CEO job is not that complicated, right? You know, it is, uh, 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, uh, partially joke around, which is like, I have to spend 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, uh, 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 a bit 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. Uh, I wasn't there when, like, I don't know, spreadsheets rolled out to companies, right? And like, I, I almost, I have to go think back, how did people do all this financial analysis before, right? And, and I'm sure it changed over a period of three to four years fundamentally and we got used to it. I think agents, etc. is a version of it. Uh, it's not like you're not going to plan birthday parties. Uh, 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. Welcome back. I'm talking with Google CEO Sundar Pichai about some of the announcements the company just made at Google. Let me ask you about that and agents. Some of those demos are fascinating. The idea that your search is going to build custom software for everybody. That seems like a, 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're at, 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 anti-gravity that 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. Then there's reasoning. And then now we're at agents. Is this the foundation or is there another paradigm shift to come? I think it's a great question. You know, we are... Being most of the building blocks in place, I think, I think, you know, fundamentally being able to reason, use tools and code, you know, are a lot of like, you know, 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 anti-gravity is for developers, but the anti-gravity engine, the harness, is built into Gemini now, right? And you know, Spark is just a mode of Gemini. Over time, it's a feature. We are positioning it, but, you know, it's just a tab within Gemini. And so you're bringing that agentic harness. Users don't need to think about, 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, you know, 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 have all had and worked through myriad forms of it and, you know, 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, you know, 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 intelligent 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 the canvas that makes you the apps, like 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. You know, it will. The agents, just like I gave the earlier notebook example of like, you know, 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. And, you know, 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 would 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, you know, 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, right? What's the capital of the USA? You know, it's not going to be custom created for anyone, right? These are objective things. Help me plan a nice trip to Montreal for a weekend. You know, naturally, the answers don't need to be the same for everyone, right? 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, right? 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 one's a favorite. We have a very scientific, statistical way of doing this. I think this is important. And I want to get into how consumers might be experiencing these products. So this is 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 and you're 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 overview is an 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, with search is, it's easy to measure user satisfaction over 25 years. We have 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 any experience wrong, it shows in the metrics and we course correct, right? And we pride on the ability to track this over longer term, be it engagement, sessions, returning to a topic, the number of bounce backs 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. Do you think 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 the 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 maybe 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 in the 0.0001%. This is kind of what 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 the 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. It 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, was booed at a college graduation speech he was giving. 7 in 10 Americans oppose 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, rightfully so, AI is the most profound technology humanity is going to deal with. It's happening at a very fast pace. I don't think humans are evolved for processing this much change. And the rate of change, particularly over the last few years, is, you know, incredibly high. And people, rightfully so, particularly with all the, what they are hearing, I think people are trying to understand the future and in the personal context of their lives, including, you know, what it means at the economic level and so on, right? And so to me, it really makes sense why there is anxiety around this technology. 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 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 concerns about it. It feels natural to me. You know, 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 multi-layered problem. And, but I don't think all the source of the data center angst 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, right? It is, 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've just pulled 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 pull, right, if you ask about the internet as a, 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 view that's 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 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 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, this is more profound than fire or electricity. And so I'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 SynthID. 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. Cybersecurity 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. 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. It doesn't. I think we have the killer app for enterprise. I want to talk about the web though, before I've run out of time. There are times I've gone through a health journey in Gemini. It feels more than a killer app to me. 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. We have to take another short break here. We'll be back in just a minute. Welcome back. I'm talking with Google CEO, Sundar Pichai about what Google and AI search have done and might continue to do to the open web. 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 via requires, I believe, your training Gemini and like YouTube videos, right? Like via 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 Google will stop sending traffic to the web. You've disagreed with me that this is real. Very much so. This last week. That doesn't happen in the last many years. Well, I'm just going to read you a quote. This time it's not me. And I, I didn't, I didn't feed this to him. Roger Lynch, CEO of Condé Nast. He did an interview to VPN last week. And he said, I'm just gonna read a quote. Every year our search traffic was down more than we forecast. So last year I told our teams, assume there is no search. If you have to have your businesses planned as a 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 everywhere. So 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 your 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. We are shifting it from a world of mobile to people having ongoing conversations, chatting with these products, talking to them, consuming it in voice and, you know, many different form factors. People are expressing preferences for various types of content. They're looking for user generated content. They're looking for podcasts. You know, they, they're looking for that. Through it all, we are very committed to 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 have 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? Sure. 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 businesses better. I mean, I'm not in a position to tell, you know, such iconic publisher what they should think about their business or plan. 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. Right. 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, 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 the 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 dynamic and people are going to a wider array of information. So, you know, 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 these 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 it's a new change, which we didn't have before. We are adapting to the fact that publishers are important. 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, you know, laws and regulations will have to evolve, the courts will have to remain. 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 rider charter every year that you can use media association, essentially a quote to read to you. And, you know, they say Google calling us free riders is obviously ridiculous and it ignores basic supply chain economics. If the value were really all on Google 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 that 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. You know, we are also trying to put out products which are competitive to other products out there, right? And I think 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. Paint me the picture for what a healthy web looks like in the 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 when 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. 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. And there will be a lot of debates about what's okay, what's not. And, but I think the web will continue to be, people want to put out information, connect with other people. People want to be connected. You know, people aren't trying to be in a siloed world detached. That doesn't reflect the reality of the human experience. And I think the web is going to play a central role 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 and new features and agentic tools you can use and UCP and Amazon and Walmart and everyone are 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 think... Do you have a definition of AGI? Have you debated? Do you have an agreement? We debated a lot. I think both Dennis and I are very close to how we think about and, you know, think about. We think about AGI in the, you know, in a, there is a harder definition of AGI, which is, you know, that it has to be more comprehensively do, you know, the wide range of tasks, including cognitive tasks 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 our company, but amongst the frontier labs. I think there's wide consensus that this technology, AGI is people may quibble around, like, you know, is it like three years, five, 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 at the end of the first time we ever talked about AI, I asked you if language was intelligence. And, you know, the progression here is we're layering more and more on LLMs. We're doing longer chains of reasoning. We're building harnesses. We're doing all this stuff. 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 trajectory over the last few years has been incredible. And looking ahead, you know, it looks, the LLMs of today are, you know, have evolved in many ways too. So we are constantly evolving it. And to me, it's like asking, like, can computers get us to, like, the way, you know, the von Neumann architectures is still what powers most computers today. But, you know, he won't recognize the modern, one of our TPU pods, right? And like, or maybe he would, you know, there's still a lot of commonality to it. So I think the underlying technology keeps evolving so profoundly. I look at every year, we have had major breakthroughs. I recently, I mean, you just saw his demo in anti-gravity 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 make sure we don't kill the max on creating, I'll give you that. It's fair, 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 the world who are interacting with these tools and using them 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. I do think it has important evolutions to happen. And then there are strong opinions out there in the world about, you know, how much of a real understanding of the world you need, you know, to take that next leap. You know, 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 to 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, three years from now, whether you and I call it AGI or not, doesn't matter because it'll be very, very powerful and we have to prepare for it. Yeah. Sundar, this is great. Thank you so much for the time again. Thanks, Nilak. Pleasure. I'd like to thank Sundar 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 decoder at theverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads or blue sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. It's the same handle on TikTok and Instagram. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you really like the show, hit us with that five-star review. The show is produced by Kate Cox-Nichstadt. This episode was additionally produced by Victoria Barrios and shot by Owen Grove and Brett Putman. It was edited by Kabir Chopra. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time. Hi, I'm Dustin, your friend and jeweler at Shane Company. As a diamond sourcing expert, I'll tell you just how differently we source our diamonds so your engagement ring can be the most beautiful. We work directly with our diamond partners who reserve the best stones just for us. We handpick and