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Podcast

#471 – Sundar Pichai- CEO of Google and Alphabet

Lex Fridman Podcast

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  • Humble Beginnings in Chennai
    • Sundar Pichai grew up in a modest two-room apartment in Chennai with limited technology access.
    • He vividly recalls the transformative impact of technology like phones and VCRs in his childhood. Transcript: Lex Fridman Your life story is inspiring to a lot of people. It’s inspiring to me. You grew up in India, whole family living in a humble two-room apartment. Very little, almost no access to technology. And from those humble beginnings, you rose to lead a $2 trillion technology company. So if you could travel back in time and told that, let’s say, 12-year Sundar, that you’re now leading one of the largest companies in human history, what do you think that young kid would Say? I would have probably laughed it off. Sundar Pichai You know, probably too far-fetched to imagine or believe at that time. You would have to explain the internet first. For sure. I mean, computers to me at that time, you know, I was 12 in 1984. So probably, you know, by then I had started reading about them. I hadn’t seen one. What was that place like? Take me to your childhood. I grew up in Chennai. It’s in south of India. A beautiful, bustling city. Lots of people, lots of energy. You know, simple life, definitely like fond memories of playing cricket outside the home. We just used to play on the streets. All the neighborhood kids would come out and we would play until it got dark and we couldn’t play anymore barefoot. Traffic would come. It would just stop the game. Everything would drive through and you would just continue playing, right, just to kind of get the visual in your head. You know, pre-computers was a lot of free time. Now that I think about it, now you have to go and seek that quiet solitude or something. Newspapers, books is how I gained access to the world’s information at the time, you will. My grandfather was a big influence. He worked in the post office. He was so good with language. His English, you know, his handwriting till today is the most beautiful handwriting I’ve ever seen. He would write so clearly. He was so articulate. And so he kind of got me introduced into books. He loved politics. So we could talk about anything. And, you know, that was there in my family throughout. So lots of books, trashy books, good books, everything from Ayn Rand to books on philosophy to stupid crime novels. So books was a big part of my life. But that kind of, this whole, it’s not surprising I ended up at Google because Google’s mission kind of always resonated deeply with me, this access to knowledge. I was hungry for it, but definitely have fond memories of my childhood. Access to knowledge was there. So that’s the wealth we had. You know, every aspect of technology I had to wait for a while. I’ve obviously spoken before about how long it took for us to get a phone, about five years. But it’s not the only thing. A telephone. There was a five-year waiting list. And we got a rotary telephone. But it dramatically changed our lives. You know, people would come to our house to make calls to their loved ones. You know, I would have to go all the way to the hospital to get blood test records, and it would take two hours to go, and they would say, sorry, it’s not ready, come back the next day. Two hours to come back. And that became a five-minute thing. So as a kid, like, I light bulb went in my head, this power of technology to kind of change people’s lives. We had no running water. It was a massive drought. So they would get water in these trucks, maybe eight buckets per household. So me and my brother, sometimes my mom, we would wait in line, get that and bring it back home. Many years later, like we had running water and we had a water heater and you could get hot water to take a shower. I mean, like, so, you know, for me, everything was discreet like that. And so I’ve always had this thing, you know, first-hand feeling of like how technology can dramatically change like your life and like the opportunity it brings. So, you know, that was kind of a subliminal takeaway for me throughout growing up. And, you know, I kind of actually observed it and felt it, you know. So we had to convince my dad for a long time to get a VCR. Do you know what a VCR is? Yeah. I’m trying to date you now. But, you know, because before that, you only had like kind of one TV channel, right? That’s it. And so, you know, you can watch movies or something like that but this was by the time I was in 12th grade we got a VCR you know it was a like a Panasonic which we had to go to some like shop which Had kind of smuggled it in I guess and that’s where we bought a VCR but then being able to record like a World Cup football game and then or like get bootlegged videotapes and watch movies, Like all that. So like, you know, I had these discreet memories growing up. And so, you know, always left me with the feeling of like how getting access to technology drives that step change in your life. Lex Fridman I don’t think you’ll ever be able to equal the first time you get hot water. Sundar Pichai To have that convenience of going and opening a tap and have hot water come out, yeah. It’s interesting. Lex Fridman We take for granted the progress we’ve made. If you look at human history, just those plots that look at GDP across 2,000 years, and you see that exponential growth to where most of the progress happened since the Industrial Revolution. And we just take for granted. We forget how far we’ve gone. So our ability to understand how great we have it and also how quickly technology can improve is quite poor. Sundar Pichai Oh, I mean, it’s (Time 0:07:55)
  • Advice for Young People
    • Listen to your heart to find work you truly enjoy doing.
    • Surround yourself with people better than you to stretch your abilities and grow. Transcript: Sundar Pichai Phenomenal. Lex Fridman What advice would you give to young folks listening to this all over the world who look up to you and find your story inspiring? Who want to be maybe the next Sundar Bichai, who want to start, create companies, build something that has a lot of impact on the world. Sundar Pichai Look, you have a lot of luck along the way, but you obviously have to make smart choices. You’re thinking about what you want to do. Your brain is telling you something. But when you do things, I think it’s important to kind of get that, listen to your heart and see whether you actually enjoy doing it. Right? That feeling of if you love what you do, it’s so much easier and you’re going to see the best version of yourself. It’s easier said than done. I think it’s tough to find things you love doing. But I think kind of listening to your heart a bit more than your mind in terms of figuring out what you want to do, I think is one of the best things I would tell people. The second thing is, I mean, trying to work with people who you feel at various points in my life. I’ve worked with people who I felt were better than me. I kind of like, you know, you almost are sitting in a room talking to someone and they’re like, wow, like, you know, you you want that feeling a few times. Trying to get yourself in a position where you’re working with people who you feel are kind of like stretching your abilities is what helps you grow, I think. So putting yourself in uncomfortable situations. And I think often you’ll surprise yourself. So I think being open-minded enough to kind of put yourself in those positions is maybe another thing I would say. Well, (Time 0:14:03)
  • AI as the Ultimate Technology
    • AI will likely become the most profound technology, surpassing fire and electricity.
    • Its recursive self-improvement and rapid progress place it in a league of its own. Transcript: Sundar Pichai It’s a great question. Look, many years ago, I think it might’ve been 2017 or 2018, you know, I said at the time, like, you know, AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It’ll be more profound than fire or electricity. So I have to back myself. I still think that’s the case. When you asked this question, I was thinking, well, do we have a recency bias? Like in sports, it’s very tempting to call the current person you’re seeing the greatest player. Is there a recency bias? And, you know, I do think from first principles, I would argue AI will be bigger than all of those. I didn’t live through those moments. You know, two years ago, I had to go through a surgery and then I processed that there was a point in time people didn’t have anesthesia when they went through these procedures. At that moment, I was like, that has got to be the greatest invention humanity has ever done, right? So look, we don’t know what it is to have lived through those times. But, you know, many of what you’re talking about were kind of this general things, which pretty much affected everything, you know, electricity or internet, etc. But I don’t think we’ve ever dealt with a technology, both which is progressing so fast, becoming so capable. It’s not clear what the ceiling is. And the main unique, it’s recursively self-improving, right? It’s capable of that. And so the fact it is going, first technology will kind of dramatically accelerate creation itself, like creating things, building new things, can improve and achieve things on its Own, I think puts it in a different league. Right? And so differently. And so I think the impact it will end up having will far surpass everything we’ve seen before. (Time 0:20:45)
  • AI Unlocks Human Creativity
    • Expect AI to simplify turning thoughts into creations and expression.
    • The current complexity in AI coding and creation will improve, making it more accessible. Transcript: Sundar Pichai I mean, most of it probably we don’t know today, but like, you know, the one thing which we can tangibly start seeing now is, you know, obviously with the coding progress, you got a sense Of it. It’s going to be so easy to imagine, like thoughts in your head, translating that into things that exist, that’ll be part of the package, right? Like it’s going to empower almost all of humanity to kind of express themselves. Maybe in the past you could have expressed with words, but like you could kind of build things into existence, right? You know, maybe not fully today. We are at the early stages of Vibe coding. You know, I’ve been amazed at what people have put out online with VO3, but it takes a bit of work, right? You have to stitch together a set of prompts, but all this is going to get better. The thing I always think about, this is the worst it’ll ever be, right? Like at any given moment in time. Yeah, it’s interesting you (Time 0:25:43)
  • Supporting Artistic Freedom
    • Artistic free expression is a vital societal value to defend.
    • Provide tools for artists to push creative boundaries responsibly. Transcript: Sundar Pichai You value that. There are people who use it incredibly. You know, think about somebody like a James Cameron, what he would do with these tools in his hands. But I think there’ll be a lot more content created, like just like writers today use Google Docs and not think about the fact that they’re using a tool like that. Like people will be using the future versions of these things. Like it won’t be a big deal at all to them. Lex Fridman I’ve gotten a chance to get to know Darren Aronofsky well. He’s been really leaning in and trying to figure out. It’s fun to watch a genius who came up before any of this was even remotely possible. He created Pi, one of my favorite movies, and from there just continued to create a really interesting variety of movies. And now he’s trying to see how can AI be used to create compelling films. (Time 0:31:51)
  • Evolving AI Nuance and Access
    • Advanced AI models can reason through nuanced issues better than earlier versions.
    • User demand is growing for more direct and raw AI model access. Transcript: Sundar Pichai Think one of the good insights here has been, as the models are getting more capable, the models are really good at this stuff, right? And so I think in some ways, maybe a year ago, the models weren’t fully there. So they would also do stupid things more often. And so, you know, you’re trying to handle those edge cases, but then you make a mistake in how you handle those edge cases and it compounds. But I think with 2.5, what we particularly found is once the models cross a certain level of intelligence and sophistication, they are able to reason through these nuanced issues pretty Well. And I think users really want that. You want as much access to the raw model as possible. But I think it’s a great area to think about, like, you know, over time, you know, we should allow more and more closer access to it. Maybe, obviously, let people custom prompts if they wanted to, and like, you know, and, you know, experiment with it, etc. I think that’s an important direction. But look, the first principles we want to think about it is, from a scientific standpoint, making sure the models, and I’m saying scientific in the sense of how you would approach math Or physics or something like that, from first principles, having the models reason about the world, be nuanced, et cetera, you know, from the ground up is the right way to build these Things, right? Not like some subset of humans kind of hard coding things on top of it. So I think it’s the direction we’ve been taking. And I think you’ll see us continue to push in that direction. (Time 0:36:37)
  • Experiencing Google Beam’s Magic
    • Sundar Pichai experienced Google Beam’s live 3D presence demo and was deeply impressed.
    • He highlighted its potential for enhancing communication between distant individuals, including world leaders. Transcript: Lex Fridman Break and now we’re talking about the demo i did we’ll probably post it somewhere somehow maybe here the i got a chance to experience beam and it was it’s hard to it’s hard to describe in Words how real it felt with just what is it six cameras it’s incredible it’s incredible it’s one of the toughest products of, you can’t quite describe it to people. Sundar Pichai Even when we show it in slides, et cetera, like you don’t know what it is. You have to kind of experience it. Lex Fridman On the world leaders front, on politics, geopolitics, there’s something really special. Again, we’re studying World War II and how much could have been saved if Chamberlain met Stalin in person. And I sometimes also struggle explaining to people, articulating why I believe meeting in person for world leaders is powerful. It just seems naive to say that, but there is something there in person. And with Beam, I felt that same thing. And then I’m unable to explain all i kept doing is what like a child does you look real you know and i mean i don’t know if that makes meetings more productive or so on but it certainly makes Them more uh the same reason you want to show up to work versus remote sometimes, that human connection. I don’t know what that is. It’s hard to put into words. There’s something beautiful about great teams collaborating on a thing that’s not captured by the productivity of that team or by whatever on paper. Some of the most beautiful moments you experience in life is at work. Pursuing a difficult thing together for many months. There’s nothing like it. You’re in the trenches and you do form bonds that way, for sure. And to be able to do that like somewhat remotely in that same personal touch. I don’t know. That’s a deeply fulfilling thing. I know a lot of people, I personally hate meetings because a significant percent of meetings when done poorly don’t serve a clear purpose. But that’s a meeting problem. That’s not a communication problem. If you can improve the communication for the meetings that are useful, it’s just incredible. So yeah, I was blown away by the great engineering behind it. And then we get to see what impact that has. That’s really interesting, but just incredible engineering. Really impressive. Sundar Pichai Oh, it is. And obviously we’ll work hard over the years to make it more and more accessible. But yeah, even on a personal front, outside of work meetings, you know, a grandmother who’s far away from our grandchild and being able to, you know, have that kind of an interaction, Right? All that I think will end up being very mean. Nothing substitutes being in person, but, you know, it’s not always possible. You know, you could be a soldier deployed, right? Trying to talk to your loved ones. (Time 0:54:00)
  • Calm Leadership Under Pressure
    • Tune out external noise and focus on internal signals to lead effectively.
    • Make consequential decisions decisively and build strong teams for long-term success. Transcript: Sundar Pichai Is winning again. What were some low points during that time? Look, I mean, lots to unpack. You know, obviously, like, I mean, the main bet I made as a CEO was to really, you know, make sure the company was approaching everything in an AI-first way, really setting ourselves Up to develop AGI responsibly, right? And make sure we’re putting out products, which embodies things that are very, very useful for people. So look, I knew even through moments like that last year, you know, I had a good sense of what we were building internally, right? So I’d already made, you know, many important decisions, you know, bringing together teams of the caliber of brain and deep mind and setting up Google DeepMind. There were things like we made the decision to invest in TPUs 10 years ago. So we knew we were scaling up and building big models. Anytime you’re in a situation like that, a few aspects, I’m good at tuning out noise, right? Separating signal from noise. Do you scuba dive? Like, have you? No. You know, it’s amazing. Like, I’m not good at it, but I’ve done it a few times. But sometimes you jump in the ocean, it’s so choppy. But you go down one feet under, it’s the calmest thing in the entire universe, right? So there’s a version of that, right? Like, you know, running Google, you know, you may as well be coaching Barcelona or Real Madrid, right? Like, you know, you have a bad season. So there are aspects to that. But, you know, like, look, I’m good at tuning out the noise. I do watch out for signals. You know, it’s important to separate the signal from the noise. So there are good people sometimes making good points outside. So you want to listen to it. You want to take that feedback in. But, you know, internally, like, you know, you’re making a set of consequential decisions. Right. As leaders, you’re making a lot of decisions. Many of them are like It feels like, but over time, you learn that. Most of the decisions you’re making on a day-to basis doesn’t matter. You have to make them, and you’re making them just to keep things moving. But you have to make a few consequential decisions, right? And we had set up the right teams, right leaders. We had world-class researchers. We were training Gemini. Internally, there are factors which were, for example, outside people may not have appreciated. I mean, TPUs are amazing, but we had to ramp up TPUs too. That took time, right? And to scale, actually having enough TPUs to get the compute needed. But I could see internally the trajectory we were on. And I was so excited internally about the possibility. To me, this moment felt like one of the biggest opportunities ahead for us as a company. That the opportunity space ahead over the next decade, next 20 years is bigger than what has happened in the past. And I thought we were set up like better than most companies in the world to go realize that vision. (Time 0:58:00)
  • Integrating AI in Search Experience
    • Integrate AI into search by providing context and summaries while linking back to human-created content.
    • Prioritize transparency and user control as AI-driven search evolves. Transcript: Lex Fridman About the decision to recently add AI mode? So Google search is the, as they say, the front page of the internet. It’s like a legendary minimalist thing with 10 blue links. Like that’s when people think internet, they think that page. And now you’re starting to mess with that. So the AI mode, which is a separate tab, and then integrating AI in the results. I’m sure there were some battles in meetings on that one. Sundar Pichai Look, you know, in some ways when mobile came, you know, people wanted answers to more questions. So we’re kind of constantly evolving it. But you’re right. This moment, you know, that evolution, because the underlying technology is becoming much more capable. You know, you can have AI give a lot of context, you know, but one of our important design goals, though, is when you come to Google search, you’re going to get a lot of context, but you’re Going to go and find a lot of things out on the web. So that will be true in AI mode, in AI overviews and so on. But I think to our earlier conversation, we are still giving you access to links, but think of the AI as a layer which is giving you context, summary, maybe in AI mode, you can have a dialogue With it back and forth on your journey. Right. But through it all, you’re kind of learning what’s out there in the world. So those core principles don’t change, but I think AI mode allows us to push the, we have our best models there, right? Models which are using search as a deep tool, really for every query you’re asking, kind of fanning out, doing multiple searches, like kind of assembling that knowledge in a way so you Can go and consume what you want to, right? And how we think about it. Lex Fridman I got to just listen to a bunch of Elizabeth, Liz Reed, describe this. Two things stood out to me that she mentioned. One thing is what you were talking about is the query fanout, which I didn’t even think about before, is the powerful aspect of integrating a bunch of stuff on the web for you in one place. So yes, it provides that context so that you can decide which page to then go on to. The other really, really big thing speaks to the earlier, in terms of productivity multiply that we’re talking about that she mentioned was language. So one of the things you don’t quite understand is, through AI mode, you make, for non-English speakers, you make, let’s say, English language websites accessible, by, in the reasoning Process, as you try to figure out what you’re looking for. Of course, once you show up to a page, you can use a basic translate. But that process of figuring it out, if you empathize with a large part of the world that doesn’t speak English, their web is much smaller in that original language. And so it unlocks, again, unlocks that huge cognitive capacity there. You take for granted here with all the bloggers and the journalists writing about AI mode. You forget that this now unlocks, because Gemini is really good at translation. Sundar Pichai No, it is. I mean, the multimodality, the translation, its ability to reason, we are dramatically improving tool use. Like, so putting that power in the flow of search, I think, look, I’m super excited. With the AI overviews, we’ve seen the product has gotten much better. We measured using all kinds of user metrics. It’s obviously driven strong growth of the product. And, you know, we’ve been testing AI mode. You know, it’s now in the hands of millions of people. And the early metrics are very encouraging. So look, I’m excited about this next chapter of search. This. So there’s the 10 blue links with AI overview on top that provides a nice summarization. Lex Fridman You can expand it. And you have sources and links now embedded. (Time 1:08:10)
  • AI Boosts Engineering Productivity
    • Use AI to increase engineering productivity and reduce grunt work.
    • Embrace AI tools to focus more on creative problem-solving and design challenges. Transcript: Lex Fridman I have to ask you, on the programming front, AI is getting really good at programming. Gemini, both the Agentec and just the LLM, has been incredible. So a lot of programmers are really worried that their jobs, they will lose their jobs. How worried should they be? And how should they adjust so they can be thriving in this new world where more and more code is written by AI? Sundar Pichai I think a few things, looking at Google, you know, we’ve given various stats around like, you know, 30% of code now uses like AI generated suggestions or whatever it is. But the most important metric, and we carefully measure it, is like how much has our engineering velocity increased as a company due to AI, right? And it’s like tough to measure and we kind of rigorously try to measure it. And our estimates are that number is now at 10%, right? Like now across the company, we’ve accomplished a 10% engineering velocity increase using AI. But we plan to hire engineers, more engineers next year, right? So because the opportunity space of what we can do is expanding too, right? And so I think hopefully, at least in the near to midterm, for many engineers, it frees up more and more of the, you know, even in engineering and coding, there are aspects which are so Much fun. You’re designing, you’re architecting, you’re solving a problem. There’s a lot of grunt work, you know, which all goes hand in hand. But it hopefully takes a lot of that away, makes it even more fun to code, frees you up more time to create, problem solve, brainstorm with your fellow colleagues and so on. So that’s the opportunity there. And second, I think it’ll attract, it’ll put the creative power in more people’s hands, which means people create more. That means there’ll be more engineers doing more things. So it’s tough to fully predict, but I think in general in this moment, it feels like people adopt these tools and be better programmers. There are more people playing chess now than ever before, right? So, you know, it feels positive that way to me, at least speaking from within a Google context, is how I would, you know, talk to them about it. Lex Fridman I still, I just know anecdotally, a lot of great programmers are generating a lot of code. So their productivity, they’re not always using all the code, just, you know, there’s still a lot of editing. But like, even for me, programming is a side thing. I think I’m like 5x more productive. I don’t, I think that’s, even for a large code base that’s touching a lot of users like Google’s does, I’m imagining like very soon that productivity should be going up even more. Sundar Pichai The big unlock will be as we make the agent capabilities much more robust, right? I think that’s what unlocks that next big wave. I think the 10% is like a massive number. Like, you know, tomorrow, like I showed up and said, like, you can improve like a large organization’s productivity by 10%. When you have tens of thousands of engineers, that’s a phenomenal number. And, you know, that’s different than what others cite as statistics saying, like, you know, like this percentage of code is now written by AI. I’m talking more about like overall actual productivity, right? Engineering productivity, which is two different things. And which is the more important metric. And, but I think it’ll get better, right? (Time 1:36:30)
  • AR as Next Computing Paradigm
    • Augmented reality (AR) combined with AI represents the next major computing paradigm.
    • AR glasses will enable natural and seamless interactions, rethinking mobile OS experiences. Transcript: Lex Fridman With a basic, efficient, minimalist UI, I’ve gotten a chance to try the glasses and they’re incredible. It’s the little stuff. It’s hard to put into words, but no latency. It just works. Even that little map demo where you look down and you look up and there’s a very smooth transition between the two. And useful, very small amount of useful information is shown to you. Enough not to distract from the world outside, but enough to provide a bit of context when you need it. And some of that, in order to bring that into reality, you have to solve a lot of the OS problems to make sure it works when you’re integrating the AI into the whole thing. So everything you do launches an agent that answers some basic question. It’s a good moonshot. I love it. It’s crazy. Sundar Pichai But I think we are, but it’s much closer to reality than other moonshots. We expect to have classes in the hands of developers later this year and in consumer science next year. So it’s an exciting time. Yeah, extremely well executed. (Time 1:45:28)
  • The Essence of Humanity
    • What makes humans special is consciousness, empathy, and kindness.
    • Increasing resource abundance could help nurture these uniquely human values. Transcript: Sundar Pichai Look, I think it’s tough to talk about the essence of humanity. There’s something about the consciousness we have, what makes us uniquely human. Maybe the lines will blur over time and it’s tough to articulate. But I hope, hopefully, you know, we live in a world where if you make resources more plentiful and make the world lesser a zero-sum game over time, which it’s not, but in a resource-constrained Environment, people perceive it to be. And so I hope the values of what makes us uniquely human, empathy, kindness, all that surfaces more. (Time 1:53:51)
  • Optimism on Human Progress
    • Human civilization has relentlessly improved despite challenges.
    • Sundar Pichai prefers being born in the present time due to progress. Transcript: Sundar Pichai What gives you hope about the future of human civilization? I’m an optimist and I look at if you were to say you take the journey of human civilization, we’ve relentlessly made the world better in many ways. At any given moment in time, there are big issues to work through. It may look, but I always ask myself the question, would you have been What born now or any other time in the past? I most often, not most often, almost always would rather be born now, right, you know. And so that’s the extraordinary thing the human civilization has accomplished. Right. And like, you know, and we’ve kind of constantly made the world a better place. And so something tells me as humanity, we always rise collectively to drive that frontier forward. (Time 1:55:36)