#471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet

Sundar Pichai: We had no running water, it was a massive drought. So they would get water in these trucks, maybe 8 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, firsthand feeling of like how technology can dramatically change like your life and like the opportunity it brings. So, that was kind of a subliminal takeaway for me throughout growing up.

Sundar Pichai: I think the big thing is that it makes it accessible. It unlocks the cognitive capabilities of the entire 8 billion. No, I agree. Look, think about 40 years ago. Maybe in the US, there were five people who could do what you were doing, like go do an interview. But today, think about with YouTube and other products, et cetera, like how many more people are doing it? So I think this is what technology does, right? Like when the internet created blogs, you heard from so many more people. So I think with AI, I think that number won't be in the few hundreds of thousands. It'll be 10s of millions of people, maybe even a billion people, like putting out things into the world in a deeper way. And I think it'll change the landscape of creativity.

Sundar Pichai: I 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 across 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, right? Like, you want as much access to the raw model as possible, right? ... from a scientific standpoint, like making sure the models, and I'm saying scientific in the sense of like 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, 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.

Sundar Pichai: Will the AI think it has reached AGI by 2030? I would say we will just fall short of that timeline, right? So I think it'll take a bit longer... But, for me, the whole thing, seeing what Google Brain did in 2012 and when we acquired DeepMind in 2014... we all talked about a couple of decades. I don't think we'll quite get there by 2030. So my sense is it's slightly after that. But I would stress it doesn't matter what that definition is, because you will have mind-blowing progress on many dimensions.