Exclusive: Google’s Sundar Pichai talks Search, AI, and dancing with Microsoft

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May 12, 2023

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, shares insights on the transformative era of AI and its implications for search technology. He reflects on Google’s pioneering role in AI and discusses the fierce competition from Microsoft and OpenAI. Pichai highlights how generative AI could reshape user experiences and the search landscape, addressing both innovative applications and ethical concerns. He also reveals the reorganization within Google, merging DeepMind and Google Brain, as part of their ongoing commitment to AI advancement and reliability.

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INSIGHT

AI as a Platform Shift

Sundar Pichai believes AI is a profound platform shift, comparable to the advent of personal computing, the internet, and mobile.
He sees it as more impactful than previous shifts, touching every industry more deeply, like healthcare.

ANECDOTE

Early AI Demo Hesitation

In 2015, Sundar Pichai wanted to showcase Google Photos' use of deep neural networks at I/O.
There were internal concerns, but he felt it was crucial to explain the technology's potential impact.

ANECDOTE

The Pluto Conversation

Nilay Patel recalls a demo where Sundar Pichai conversed with Pluto, which was actually Google's Lambda.
This highlighted Google's early exploration of conversational AI and the limitations of handcrafted systems.

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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.

We have a special episode today – I’m talking to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet. We hung out the day after Google IO, the company’s big developer conference, where Sundar introduced new generative AI features in virtually all of the company’s products.

It’s an important moment for Google, which invented a lot of the core technology behind the current AI moment – the company is quick to point out the T in chatGPT stands for Transformer, the large language model tech first which was invented at Google. But openAI and others have been first to market with generative AI products — and openAI in particular has partnered with Microsoft on a new version of Bing that feels like the first real competitor to Google search in a long time.

So I wanted to know what Sundar thinks of this moment – and in particular, what he thinks of the future of search, which is the heart of Google’s business. Web search right now can be pretty hit or miss, right? There’s a lot of weird content farms out there, and AI-based search might be able to just answer questions in a more natural way. But that means remaking the web, and really, remaking Google.

Sundar is already going down that path – he just reorganized Google and Alphabet’s AI teams, moving a company called DeepMind inside Google and merging it with the Google Brain AI group to form a new unit called Google DeepMind. I can’t resist an org chart question, so we talked about why he made that call – and how he made it.

We also talked about Sundar’s vision for Google – where he wants it to go, and what’s driving his ambition to take the company into the future.

This is a jam-packed episode – we talked about a lot, and I didn’t even get to Google’s AI metadata plans, or what’s going on with RCS and Android. Maybe next time.

Links:

The nine biggest announcements from Google I/O 2023

What happens when Google Search doesn't have the answers?

Microsoft thinks AI can beat Google at search — CEO Satya Nadella explains why

Let’s chat about RCS - The Verge

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23484772

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