How Sundar Pichai is rethinking Google for the AI era | Decoder

0:00 - How close is AI to replacing you as the CEO? - I just think the CEO job is not that complicated. (Nilay laughing) (upbeat music) People are standing and telling about how AI could make a lot of jobs go away, right? And like why wouldn't you feel a sense of anxiety about it, right? And like I think those are deeper issues which we have to tackle as a society. - I/O ended with Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind, coming out.

0:23 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? (upbeat music) 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.

0:46 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.

1:12 That's a lot to talk about, and Sundar 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.

1:34 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 intelligence 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.

1:57 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.

2:26 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 I/O 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.

2:56 I think you're really gonna like this year's conversation. Okay, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, here we go. Sundar Pichai, you're the CEO of Alphabet and of Google, welcome back to "Decoder." - Well, 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 I/O now almost five times. - Wow, I quite didn't realize it's been five times, but I enjoy it, thanks again.

3:17 - Yeah, I wanna start with a little bit of a lightning round. - Yeah. - 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 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.

3:44 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 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.

4:27 But at a high level, you can think of it as 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 ma many, many other bets like Isomorphic Labs and so on.

4:57 - 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, is a public company with many bets. But just to say 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.

5:21 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, "All right, 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?

5:42 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've 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 so I've been we've been deep and consistent in many, many areas over a long period of time as well.

6:14 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.

6:53 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 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.

7:21 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're useful for users, but the underlying technology platform is common. So there's a lot of intent that way and 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.

7:57 Take Notebook, NotebookLM, and 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 NotebookLM, you'll see the same Notebooks, vice versa. So that's an example of where you innovate it first and then you are harmonizing later. - Yeah. - Yeah. - I was watching that 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.

8:27 It's still essentially Googly, like there's lots of products, lots of Gemini words, I'm gonna figure them all out, I promise. I would contrast to, I don't know, three, four years ago when there was the ChatGPT 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.

8:54 How did you think about, "Okay, 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 we had set the company, you know, I pivoted the company to be AI first. We had all the ingredients, so in some ways I felt like the Overton window had changed.

9:22 People were adopting these technologies faster than we had expected. And so to me it was a way to go and actually express ourself 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 DeepMind, 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.

10:11 And then at that time I also set up with Amin Vahdat, who's 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 Koray 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.

10:45 So pulling it under Elizabeth Reid 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 obviously extraordinary leaders in the company, other leaders like Philipp 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.

11:22 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, 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?

11:56 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, 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.

12:36 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 it may look big, but it is more a normal course of action you need to take.

13:07 - Yeah, 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 company is, you know, depends on what the company, some companies have a much more narrower suite of products, and so different structure may work.

13:42 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 we are serving all the top enterprises in the world at a scale, you know, and so how do you set up for that? So I think great leaders end up mattering a lot, like we have Thomas there. So I do think I think about it, but what I do think about it is how are we using AI more effectively?

14:09 And we have seen the transition internally, particularly amongst our developers, where we have transitioned from using AI tools to assist coding to them, a portion of the engineers, working directing teams of agents effectively more and more. And so I think those are transitions underway, and I think that will flow beyond just engineering into the rest of the organization, 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, et cetera.

14:45 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, right? 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.

15:19 - The number one question "Decoder" listeners want me to start asking CEOs, I'll just ask it straightforwardly, how close is AI to replacing you as the CEO? - You know, it is today, you know, still I just think the CEO job is not that complicated, right? You know, it is not complicated. There's a big, there are aspects of it where I think it's gonna be very, very helpful in terms of decision-making. I joke around that, 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 gonna 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."

16:03 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 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 it's almost I have to go think back, how did people do all this financial analysis before, right?

16:34 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 gonna plan birthday parties, it is just that 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 so on.

17:02 So I think it elevates everything to a 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 Search is gonna build custom software for everybody, that seems like an idea in software engineering, a first impression, right? The idea that the computer, you're gonna ask it a question and the response will be for it to make you software that helps you get to an answer.

17:26 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 Antigravity, 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 gonna chain some LLMs together, then there's reasoning and then now we're at agents.

17:53 Is this the foundation or is there another paradigm shift to come? - I think it's a great question. You know, we are laying most of the building blocks in place, I think fundamentally being able to reason, use tools, and code 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.

18:25 So you are kind of laying all the primitives, and obviously Antigravity is for developers, but the Antigravity engine, the harness is built into a Gemini now, right? And Spark is just a mode of Gemini, over time it's a feature, we are positioning it, but it's just a tab within Gemini, and so you are 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.

19:10 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 have 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. You know, but that's the journey, which I think is closer than ever before.

19:42 - 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 wanna talk about Search in more detail, but you look at that Search box and then you look at it's Canvas that makes you the apps, but you're planning a wedding and it'll just make you an app, you plan a trip or a wedding or something, and then you have Spark where it can go off and do things.

20:01 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, so 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.

20:31 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.

20:59 The, "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 it's 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 gonna infinitely personalize the Search box, we're gonna infinitely personalize the Search experience and we're all gonna get different answers to queries, we're all gonna maybe even look at different interfaces depending on what we're asking, what our personal context is, how much data Google has.

21:28 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.

21:59 I think there are objective experiences and subjective experiences, right? What's the capital of 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.

22:38 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 by?" - Yeah, - Right, like- - Can I show you a Search result? - Yeah. - 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.

23:07 - I think this is 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, it just 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.

23:25 And it has a top result in Reddit, and 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?

23:49 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 I mean to be very clear in the world of AI or using 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 too, but there is an opinion to go with it too, which is what you're talking about.

24:19 I do think 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. Over 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.

24:50 - Yeah. - Right, and we pride on the ability to track this over longer term, be it engagement, sessions, you know, 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.

25:20 - Yeah. - 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, 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- - Yeah. - that you're uniquely personalizing, you are the reason that query might not be exactly representative, though I think because I know how you review all these things, like so there is some chance you're on the .0001% type. - Well, this is kind of why I'm asking about infinitely personable results, right?

26:01 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. - Yeah. - 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.

26:38 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, I think people rightfully so, AI is the most profound technology humanity's going to deal with.

27:11 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 incredibly high, and people rightfully so, particularly with all what they're hearing, I think people are trying to understand the future and in their personal context of their lives, including what it means at an economic level and so on, right?

27:46 And so to me 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 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 in various products, I think they open their social media feeds and they see slop, I think they see headlines- - Sure.

28:20 - About all that stuff. I think they have the tools just sort of presented to them, the Gemini Spark shows up in all the Google products, whether you ask for it 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 don't know if the value exchange is there."

28:42 - I think these are good things to study. - Yeah. - 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 deeper factors too. - Sure. - I do. - 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.

29:00 - Yeah. - I mean, 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, your people are standing and telling about how AI could make a lot of jobs go away, right? And like why wouldn't you feel a sense of anxiety about it, right? And like 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.

29:28 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 broader and bigger than that. I do think there's a lot of AI slop out there, like I feel it. And so in an early phase of technology with the competitive dynamic that exists, I think a lot of things are getting rolled out.

29:57 But we also see empirically how people are using these products in very deep ways. And I think not all of it is, but if you go in a place where Waymo hasn't come and you just poll 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?

30:24 If you ask about the internet as they, you know, 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?

31:00 So I think that I view as our responsibility, not just us, and the government, I think there's bipartisan concerns around some of the stuff. So for example, there's a Ratepayer Pledge we all signed up to with a set of commitments, maybe there needs to be more done. I think all of that goes hand in hand. I think it's important to talk about topics like skilling, workforce adaptations.

31:30 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 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. - Yeah. - And so we have always felt that, and so, you know, or think about deep fakes and how do you know whether something is, you know, these models are getting better at simulating reality.

32:07 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. - Yeah. - 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.

32:32 You cannot have the most consequential technology rolling out 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 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'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.

33:04 I wanna talk about the web though, before I burn all of- - I make one point. There are times I've gone through a health journey in Gemini. - Yeah. - It feels more than a killer app to me. - Yeah. - Better than anything I've ever done before. So I think it's so people are going through those experiences too. - Yeah. I wanna talk about the web, the health journey in Gemini, that requires a rich dataset of health information on the web to exist.

33:27 Veo requires I believe you're training Gemini on like YouTube videos, right? Like Veo 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 that this is real. - Very much so. - This last week- - It hasn't happened in the last many years. - Well, I'm just gonna read you a quote.

33:50 It's this time it's not me and I didn't feed this to him, but Roger Lynch, the CEO of Conde Nast, he did an interview with TBPN last week and he said, I'm just gonna read you a quote, "Every year our Search traffic was down more than we had forecast. So last year I told our teams, 'Assume there is no Search,' as you have to have your businesses planned as if Search is zero." That is Google zero.

34:09 Conde 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 far we see it in the data, you see it 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.

34:41 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 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 many different form factors.

35:17 People are expressing preferences for various types of content. They're looking for user-generated content, they're looking for podcasts, you know, they're looking for that. Through it all, we are very committed to both meeting user expectations and also getting them, 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 behaviors changing, many publishers, rightfully so, are thinking about subscription models.

35:51 - Sure, but I'm just saying Conde Nast is saying, "We're going to assume our Search traffic is zero given the trends that we see." - Look- - Should they assume that? - I mean, 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 a 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.

36:24 That much I can commit to them, right? So that's what 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, in Gemini, and that 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.

36:51 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 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 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 in very different moments.

37:37 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 subscribed 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.

38:05 I do think I think both, you know, laws and regulations will have to evolve, the courts will have to ban. It's important to protect copyright, it's important to protect fair use, 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."

38:38 Every year the News Media Association sends me a quote to read you. And they say Google calling us free writers is obviously ridiculous and/or it's basic supply chain economics. If the value were really all on Google side, they would simply allow publishers to opt out. Do you wanna 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 new opt out with Google-Extended, and we are in conversations with publishers, we'll take feedback and/or times work through what makes sense and right, you know, obviously it is we are not the only player in a big ecosystem.

39:20 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, and- - And I just say 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.

39:43 - You know, I actually find- - In an agentic 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. - Okay. - 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.

40:04 In fact, I've argued the web is gonna be vibrant every year. - Yeah. - 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 I think it will evolve the web pretty profoundly.

40:28 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. - Yeah. - 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 gonna play as central a 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.

41:02 - 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 everyone, we're gonna use a new standard we're building for shopping. And all that is very tangible, and then I/O ended with Demis Hassabis, 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.

41:29 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? - Demis and I have had long, deep conversations on this topic. - I figured. - I think in this context, I think for him the advent of AGI is what he thinks of as the singularity, and I do. - Do you have a definition of AGI, have you debated?

41:52 Do you have an agreement? - We debated a lot. I think both Demis and I are very close to how we think about, and think about, we think about AGI in there is a harder definition of AGI, which is that it has to be more comprehensively do 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.

42:25 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's progressing very rapidly. And 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 to a earlier part of the conversation, it's important that we as a society understand it and are preparing as much as possible.

43:09 - I asked you this question maybe the first time we ever talked about AI, I asked you if language was intelligence? And 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, and, but the core technology is still 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 three years has been incredible.

43:35 And looking ahead, you know, it looks, the LLMs of today have evolved in many ways too, so we constantly evolving it. And to me it's like asking like can computers get us to like the way, you know, the von Neumann architecture still what powers most computers today. But 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.

44:09 I look at every year we have had major breakthroughs. I recently, I mean, you just saw his demo in Antigravity, and the 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 token max on creating, I'll give you that. It's fair. But that is the power of what these things are doing, right?

44:35 There are the top mathematicians in the world, top physicists in this 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 how much of a real understanding of the world you need, you know, to take that next leap.

45:14 You know, I'm pretty optimistic that we will continue to make a lot of progress. - Yeah. All right, so give.... Well, 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.

45:49 - Yeah, Sundar, this was great. Thank you so much for the time yet again. - Yeah, thanks, Nilay. Pleasure. (upbeat music) - [Nilay] 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 we thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read all the emails.

46:07 Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Bluesky. If you liked "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.