Google’s Weird Year + Neeva Goes to Snowflake — With Sridhar Ramaswamy
Sep 6, 2023
auto_awesome
Sridhar Ramaswamy, former SVP at Google and co-founder of Neeva, discusses Google's strange year, the future of search, generative AI, and Neeva's collaboration with Snowflake. They also explore the challenges of competing with Google, trust issues in AI-powered search, and potential breakthroughs with Snowflake's technology. Additionally, they touch on AI's impact on job loss, the future of competent individuals, and concerns about AI's future.
Google's struggles to adapt to rapid advances in AI technology and reevaluate their teams due to the popularity of competitors' AI-powered products.
The transformative potential of generative AI in revolutionizing the search experience and the challenges of trust and credibility associated with generative AI-generated content.
Deep dives
The challenges and future of Google
The podcast highlights the turbulent year for Google and the challenges they face in adapting to the rapid advances in AI technology. It discusses how the popularity of chat GPT and competitors' AI-powered products have forced Google to reevaluate and realign their teams. The podcast also explores the potential of generative AI in the business world and its impact on search. It emphasizes the need for Google to visualize the future and adapt to changing user behaviors.
The limitations of voice search
The podcast delves into the limitations of voice search technology and how it failed to live up to the expectations of becoming a popular search platform. It explains that early voice search systems were based on previous generation technology and lacked the advanced capabilities of transformer-based AI models. It highlights the power of generative AI in producing fluid and accurate answers to a wide range of queries, which voice assistants struggled with. The podcast also mentions the emergence of generative search engines like NIVA that offer a conversational search experience.
The impact of generative AI on search
The podcast discusses the transformative potential of generative AI in revolutionizing the search experience. It explains that generative search engines can understand and summarize multiple pages of information comprehensively, providing concise and accurate answers to queries. It highlights the shift towards more subjective and nuanced questions that chatbots and generative AI can effectively handle. The podcast also mentions the challenges of trust and credibility associated with generative AI-generated content, and the need for critical thinking to differentiate between reliable and unreliable information.
The future of AI in Snowflake and enterprise data
The podcast explores the acquisition of NIVA by Snowflake and its significance for enterprise data and generative AI. It discusses the potential of using generative AI in Snowflake's data retrieval system to enhance SQL queries and make data access easier for both analysts and business users. It also highlights the opportunity to integrate generative AI into Snowflake's visualization tools and create conversational interfaces for data exploration. The podcast emphasizes the aim to democratize data access and enable users to have meaningful conversations with their data within the Snowflake platform.
Sridhar Ramaswamy is the co-founder of Neeva, SVP at Snowflake and former SVP at Google. He joins Big Technology Podcast to reflect on the strange year Google’s had in 2023, working on the fly to reimagine search and ship faster than it was initially comfortable with. In this episode, Ramaswamy delivers deep insights on the future of search, generative AI, and how his former employer will adapt in these times. Stay tuned for the second half where Ramaswamy candidly discusses his search competitor Neeva, why he sold it to Snowflake, and what the two companies hope to accomplish together.
---
Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice.