YouSaid · the spoken record

Robby Stein

lines on the record: 98
first: 2025-10-10
most recent: 2025-10-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“This was probably over the last year, like last summer. Why did I say so about a year Yeah, maybe about a year ago was where maybe it started. And we were really kind of plugging away on it. And then we kind of saw this little version of it emerge that wasn't very good, but it had this moments of brilliance. And it's actually, again, it's kind of like golf where like you hit the perfect shot and you're like, oh my God, like you get that feeling where it's just everything worked. And I asked it a question about, I forget I was like, I was doing something with my daughter and I was planning an experience and it found all this like incredibly useful information about park information. It had links to like go to the site and confirm a bunch of things. It had Google Maps information that like for my daughter, you could walk up. It had like, it was walkable. Like there was early examples like this where it was just, it blew me away of what it could do, what it could find and how harmful it was. And so it gave us conviction that we should go.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make a little fresh doc with a blinker. Like, what if there's a new page and you can ask the question, you can ask whatever you want of it. You can tap right into the AI that was originally powering this top of the experience in search, but we invested in making it much more powerful in the ways I described before. It could search for you. It had reasoning as a part of its model capability. It had multi-turn context. So if you had a conversation with it, it could keep track of that context. So it had some unique pieces to it. And what would happen if we tried that quickly? And we basically got, I mean, this was probably like five to ten people worth of people originally.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it probably started earlier on with AI overviews, actually, which was the first way we brought kind of generative AI to search. And in that world, we noticed that people were asking these questions. And many people were actually trying to put natural language questions into search. And so how can you provide homeful context, links to go deeper and make an AI that made sense for Google? And so that was our first version of these models that could do this for people. And then by building into that and seeing kind of this observation around people wanting more of it direct access to it, and then being able to ask follow-up questions like you kind of need a new modality. Like it's not, it's going to be really hard to build all of that within the construct of the core search experience. And so that led us to have a form of small team of folks, a few people that were like technical leaders, a couple designers, very small, to just prove out, like, what if there was on almost like blank screen, like delete.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Market saturation, there's something happening where you need to adjust. And you then find your next growth driver or set of drivers. And that's where you need to go more first principled and try these new things more. And then when you land a new thing, that creates this new little growth engine. And then you put people on it and you optimize it because you're getting big, like each change is like 10% win, 20% win, 4% win. And it's clearly still has so much value and headroom and to make it better for people. And you can see that in the data. And so that's becoming, again, I talk about this instrumentation. It becomes your guide for knowing if you're making good calls. Otherwise, if you don't know where you're headed and you don't have a goal of where you're trying to do it more quantitatively, it's really hard to know if the thing you're doing is mattering to anyone because you'll just, I mean, I think I made the product better, but like, is anyone using it? Does anyone care? Are we just congratulating?”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one where I actually do feel like the more analytical systematic thinking helps a lot because you kind of, if you're trying to produce value in the world, you want to quantify it some way. And so if you're seeing this growth curve and you're trying to understand, wow, people are using it more and more to liking this product. And when procs are young, they grow. And then eventually things mature. And you can break out product suites and different features of products all along the same way, certain features that are going fast, other features that are not. And you get to these points of just diminishing marginal return in every system where it feels like you could put 50 people on this project. Like it's just not going to dramatically move the needle. And so part of it is this bottoms up thing with your own team being really thoughtful about what is the expected value of that investment and knowing when it's starting to approach zero, like diminishing marginal return. And then when that happens, these are these moments that usually coincide with something fundamental changing, either people's expectations externally.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make these new products work within your world. And you never just want to snap in something that's working. You have to make it work for your users, your expectations, and what people are trying to do with your product. It's actually one of the things I see people fail on the most is they assume something working for one system will work in your world. But someone else's system is on totally like the types of users they have with their consumer expectation of that product. totally different set of expectations. So you have to kind of respect that and say, well, can we learn from that and bring it here? So that was, I guess, you were to talk about the kind of the method that I've seen now twice, I guess. That's kind of how these products have developed.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be super confusing for people. It sucks. And so you have to add product carefully, but it needs to feel coherent but different. So stories, you know, it has similar aesthetic. It obviously uses your camera roll in the same way. It works. You can share it in DM. It works in the system. But it has a different primitive in the same way Google AI, it's a full page experience that you can pop out now. You can have follow-up conversation with it. People have a set of expectations and you need to snap to for those use cases. And then you are constantly learning how to best”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's the first basis of this. And then once from first principles, you're like, oh, this newer thing, and it could be a shift, could be a new form. In many ways, the AI version of Google and stories and reels, they're all kind of similar in that they're new formats in the world that people are expecting and wanting more of. And by adding them, it becomes complementary, not replacement. And in both cases, like stories didn't replace Instagram. It became, it expanded in the same way we're seeing for AI. And so what's interesting is then you think, well, how do I bring that into my world, right? You have this big mature product. And the best way I've seen is by making it complimentary, having it be a core part of the experience, but clearly defined as a distinctive thing that has its own attributes associated with it. People think spatially. So if you have a feed and you have holes with pictures, they expect those holes to do things. And so if you make one of those holes with a little clock and that one goes away the next day or you can't like it or it operates differently than the other parts of your feed.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do more for people, right? Like that would be how you increment the product. Or in Google's example, there's like something very specific with the course search experience that needs to change. It's like a subtle tweak. You have to kind of think, well, what's the big thing someone's trying to? Like someone's trying to ask a really hard question out of Google. Like, what's the best way to do that for them?”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Framework, which is one of the things that I'm a big fan of. And Clayton Christensen's book on competing against luck is one of my favorite books on this topic where you have to really be a student of causation. Why is someone using this product? Like, what are they doing with it? And what are they trying to get done with it? And that usually leads you to kind of bigger next stage ideas. And it removes this belief that you need to solve the problem with the current tools. So in the Instagram version, it was like you have to make a square photo.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, as soon as you think you're good, you're not. Like, you don't know anything. Like, the world changes quickly. You have to always be a servant to your user base and the people that are out there and learn from them. And so the first thing I always do and think about is you get in touch in terms of like, why are people using this product? And where are the areas of growth? And so usually even in a big product or a mature, in a complex system, there's a part of it that's growing. There's a part of it that's mature. There could be a part of it that's declining or isn't growing as much. Certainly in Instagram, there's been a big shift over the years of sharing into public, very large broadcast posts and feed into these more lightweight formats like stories and DM, actually private sharing as well. And so you have to observe that because every month, every year, the world changes. People's needs change. And so first thing you do is you kind of get a sense of what do people want out of this product? What's its true essence? I think a lot about this jobs to be done.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couple lessons here, and I think, by the way, the first lesson is to be humble always because it's extremely incredible to be able to work on products that have such impact on people. And I view product like golf. Like you're always one stroke away from shanking.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not like these things become core primitives quickly and formats. And then at the end of the day, you're kind of just robbing your user base of the opportunity to have a better product. If you're not making the best possible product for your use cases and for Instagram is used differently, like people use Instagram differently than they use other products. And it turns out that there were these experiences in WhatsApp and in Messenger and in many other social products over time. And they all were used differently, actually, which is fascinating.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it's more that we're focused on our users and the people who are loving Instagram. And it's denying them the opportunity to have an easy way to just share a photo and like have the thing go away. That's ultimately what we were trying to add. At the end of the day, that is a format that people adopt. In the same way that you think about feeds, I think we talked about this at the time too when we shipped it. Like, you know, Facebook probably created the modern feed, but there's a feed for every single product, right? And there's a LinkedIn feed and there's a feed for...”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A memory. And Snapchat at the time didn't allow you to upload photos. It was like you have to use a snap camera. And so we made a bunch of decisions like that where why don't you just let people upload their photo? This is the dissatisfied point. Like that's frustrating. Or there's another example where you couldn't pause if you were consuming a story. You couldn't pause it. It just would go through and be done because it was like this ephemeral thing and you wanted to create safety. Why can't you just pause? Like it's it goes by too fast. So we added this pause. It's such a small thing, but you put your finger down to pause the story now. And so there were a whole set of those things that were shipped that made stories feel Instagram. It wasn't like you just had some other thing. And then it turns out that worked incredibly well. And so much to the fact that someone on the team mentioned that they always felt like at the time they didn't realize it, but it was almost like it was missing the story size, the holes at the top of the page. And it completed the product in some weird way.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Photo clock. And actually, there were early versions of this idea where you try to take the core Instagram feed and make it ephemeral. And whenever you try to mix a core product that's very cemented in someone's mind and physically looks a specific way and you're trying to contort it to do something new, it's usually a bad recipe. And so we knew we needed to do something new. And then it was so clearly was critical to the core essence of what the product could do. It could fit in naturally. But the question was, how do we make it our own? And how do we build on this? And so if you think there were a bunch of things that we did that made it Instagram. And so, for example, it had different creative tools and it had things like neon drawing and these like really sophisticated filters that people loved. You know, we also looked at this talk about being dissatisfied. Like people took a lot of times, they want their main camera to take a picture of something and then they want to upload it to Instagram because they want to save it and they want to be in a very high quality, high resolution photo.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, an existential question because there's just a better format or a different way of doing something that has worked and works and you need to figure out what that might mean for you. Because not every great thing is going to be invented by you, but I think that a lot of these things are that they can become formats that you can make your own. And you need to learn from the world and what's happening out there in order for your product to always give the best thing to its users. And so for stories, we looked at Instagram like, what's the point of Instagram? It is sharing your life and connecting with people ultimately. And if there's a way to do that that lowers the pressure because it doesn't have likes or it's this ephemeral format and it's optimized well for mobile because it's this full screen experience. Like it's a really great format and kudos to Snapchat for inventing it. You know, we didn't think of that as like a deterrent that we had to go make Instagram.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a couple of really important lessons from that launch. And I mean, we went on afterwards to launch Reels, a bunch of updates to direct messaging. We had feed ranking. I mean, there was just a huge era there when I was there between 2016 and 2021 or so, where just so many products got built. And I think an interesting lesson in all of those, and particularly in stories, was you have to really understand why someone uses your product and know when something is”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like, well, what's going on? Right. And so you really close to root cause analysis there and say, well, actually, it turns out that it's an issue. Is it in a region? Is it on a device? Is it in a demographic? Is it in a use case? Where is my problem lie? And then when you get to it, you understand the problem. And then you can, this improvement thing comes back, or it's like, okay, I'm going to make that, I'm going to fix that thing. What's the treatment for that disease? And then you're back to growth again. And so you kind of need this. You always are looking at what's the system that I'm working on and what are my instruments. I'm a pilot to know if this thing is going and flying correctly. But then it doesn't tell you exactly what to do. You have to think for yourself how to make it better. I may just show you a little bit of the way.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Drip out of there. Like over time, it's just not exciting people, and that would go to zero on a long enough timeline, no one's going to use it. You don't get past that. You toast, right? Then, okay, some people are doing it. Okay, great. We need more people to do it. And it needs to be good enough that people talk about it, and then it grows. And so that's another gate. And then there's another one, which is like, well, how big can this get actually? Is it a small thing? Is it a medium thing? And I think most companies, like you have like an aspiration of being big, but you can't start big. Everyone's got to go through that journey. No product has started big. Even once that get big really quickly, even like a week quickly, they had something and they even internally they started small. They started small with 100, 200 people. And so you have to be metrics focused, I think, in order to know if you're doing the right thing. And then the other thing is on the other side of the spectrum, you're running a big thing. And there, you need metrics to be your guide. Like if your product is, let's say, okay, let's say our core metrics down five percent this week.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we did this other thing, and then so it comes out of this dissatisfaction and this sense of better that you need to make things better, but then you're going to build. And at the end of the day, you need your instrumentation to know if you're on the right track. And that's where you bring tools like, okay, you build your first version of the product. Do people like it? It's like, and then each product goes through its journey. So the way you understand that people like it is you scrutinize typically. You talk to people, but you also add some analytical tools there. And you might look at something like a J curve. So this is the retention, the percentage of people still using the product. Day seven, day 30, day 90, and does it flatten? Or do people just”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think of them as an or. I think they have to be intersected because basically the way to think I think about it is you actually start with a problem or the inverse of that, which is a vision. But they're connected. It's like people, most great companies, most great products come out of a problem. But out of the problem becomes like, here's a better way. What if instead of this crappy thing or way of living or thing that we all tolerate and accept, you know, some entrepreneur comes up and says,”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so a bunch of us sat around. We're like, why can't you just do this for everything? Why can't we use, instead of saying, oh, we don't need to solve for that or that's not something that's like in the most addressable next thing. It's like we actually saw people in the query stream putting the words AI at the end of their queries because they're trying to like get the AI to like do the thing. And so we would look at that and just like, this is ridiculous. We need to build something here. And that was a big motive. That was one of the big motivations was actually identifying that user problem being very disgruntled on behalf of the user. We're just failing the user every day. We are not helping them actually get their thing better understood. And we're going to go build a whole thing because of it. Because that's hard to do, by the way, to build all of that. But it just was so obvious that that's what we needed to do.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, honestly, like a big thing is working on AI mode. Like, I think a lot of it was, we saw in AI overviews that people were trying to ask harder questions and we weren't able to answer a bunch of them or AI overviews just didn't show up.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you get home, you take your fruit out of your bag, you're ready to eat it, you're all excited, you stick your thumb under the sticker, it punctures the flesh. He goes into just incredible detail about how it punctures the flesh of the fruit. The sticker comes off. Now the fruit's bleeding. Then you like flick the sticker. The sticker misses the garbage. You like bend over and pick it up. You like put the sticker back in and I was like, wow, like that is embodying this mentality, right? Of like just why is this here? How can this be better? And I think the best product people, the best thinkers in the space, that's how they think, in my opinion.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's really meaningful. And there's this other incredible story that Tony Fidel told on a TED talk like 10 years ago. You can look it up. I think it's something around Think Younger as a title. And he talks about what it means, that as we grow up and age and become grown-ups, I have two little kids. So that's something I think about a lot. We habituate to everything. Like we accept and we tolerate what the world gives us everywhere. And we just go that kind of sucks. Oh, well, we shrug our shoulders and we move on. But if you don't do that and you ask, why? Like this sucks. Like, why am I tolerating this? And how do I make it better? He has this incredible story about going grocery shopping. And he goes on for like 10 minutes about this story almost. It felt like where he talks about getting a piece of fruit, like a plum or a peach and how it has that sticker on it. You know, and it's got that sticker. And who put that sticker there?”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not that you're just unhappy. It's like you want the world to be better. You're driven out of a deep desire. You feel the sense of dissatisfaction with what the world gives you. You want to make it better. And you're pushed and motivated to do that. And I thought about that after. And it wasn't until we built a bunch of products, some that didn't do well, some that have had a lot of really large success. Now billions of people use them, where it felt like one of the big differences. Obviously a lot of it is just the conditions of the product and the, you know, a little bit of luck here and there too. But for the things that went well, there was always the spirit of just we're going to get it eventually if we just make two more moves to make it to make it better. And then eventually, as I talked about before earlier on in a conversation, you get this tipping point where it just kind of tips over into being net useful to people because of just that amount of compounding effort that you put into something because you're just always so, you're the harshest critic and the most dissatisfied person in the room about your own work, basically.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was kind of chuckling in the back room because, first of all, I kind of offended because I was like, it's not like. Loving, caring something good. And then I saw her little bubble thing. She's like, okay, there's more. And then she wrote me this really thoughtful.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course. I mean, I think that you need to be the physical manifestation of two pieces of things. One is just relentlessness, like just complete effort that is always exerted in a direction of positive productivity. And then the second is make things better. You have to always make things better. You're never content. And I think this actually came out of a story, a little bit of a funny story where I was at Instagram at the time doing a big all-team meeting when I first, and they had this icebreaker. It's like, what's one word to describe yourself? And so in the back stage area, I like texted my wife really quick. Hey, just one word to describe me. First thing that comes to your mind. And she just wrote back dissatisfied.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would have some idea, wouldn't really do it. But increasingly, you can just use language to like almost if you were to write up an order, you know, you could be like, wow, like here's a, I'm a new startup, here's my data internally, here are the APIs to it, here's the schema and the URL, here's when to use it. By the way, make sure that if you get this kind of a question, you really make sure to get it right. And that'll end up doing a lot in the model. Like the model's been now encoded to be able to say, okay, I'm going to use more reasoning or thinking budget for that kind of a question or I'm going to use tools or code use, code execution in order to connect to this API I'm told about. And that's a relatively new thing. So I think it's going to open up a lot of this democratization of accessing these models and building incredible things because you don't even need to do a lot to get the most sophisticated outcomes increasingly. I don't think you need to do a lot of this heavy duty fine-tuned.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the most recent one, and this is true, something even within the last week or two, is that it's so obvious how human-like the interface is becoming with how you can communicate and steer AI. I think it used to be even just months back that you had to do a lot of work to like get the AI to do the thing you're trying to get it to do, right? You had to do these incantations, you had to prompt in a really specific way. Like people would have all these hacks, like, hey, act like you're a coach and you do these things and you have to really push it or to use a tool more on the technical side, you had to do post-training. Like you had to take this foundational model and you had to show it data. You had to train it and actually update its weights to do more sophisticated things because it just, you tell it, hey, here's like documentation for an API if you ever have a problem, you know, ping this API. Here's the date, like as if it's like an engineer that you had that you could talk to. And it would have no idea what to do with that.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is something that we've done uniquely for our AI. It obviously has the ability to use parametric memory. Thinking and reasoning and all the things a model does. But one of the things that makes it unique for designing it specifically for informational tasks, like we wanted to be the best at informational needs, so Google's all about. And so how does it find information? How does it know if information is right? How does it check its work? These are all things that we built into the model. And so there is a unique access to Google, Google's, obviously it's part of Google search. So it's Google search signals. Everything from spam, like what's content that could be spam and we don't want to probably use in a response all the way to this is like the most authoritative, helpful piece of information. We're going to link to it and we're going to explain, hey, according to this website, check out that information and you're going to go probably go see that yourself. So that's how we've thought about designing this.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, do you satisfy the user intended what they're trying to get? Do you have sources? Do you cite your information? Is it original or is it repeating things that have been repeated 500 times? And there's these best practices that I think still do largely apply because it's going to ultimately come down to in AI is doing research and finding information. And a lot of the core signals, is this a good piece of information for the question? They're still valid. They're still extremely valid and extremely useful. And that will produce a response where you're more likely to show up in those experiences now. I think the only thing I would give advice to would be think about what people are using AI for. I mentioned this as an expansionary moment, right? Like it seems to be that people are asking a lot more questions now, particularly around things like advice or how to or more complex needs versus maybe more simple things. And so if I were a creator, I would be thinking what kind of content is someone using AI for? And then how could my content be the best?”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. I mean, I can give you a little bit of under the hood, like how this stuff works because I do think that helps people understand what to do. But, you know, when our AI constructs a response, it's actually trying to, it does something called query fan out, where the model uses Google search as a tool to do other querying. So maybe you're asking about specific shoes. It'll add and append all of these other queries, like maybe dozens of queries and start searching, basically, in the background. And animals make requests to our data kind of backends. So if it needs real-time information, it'll go do that. And so at the end of the day, actually something searching. It's not a person, but there's searches happening. And then each search is paired with content. And so if for a given search, your webpage is designed to be extremely helpful. And you can look up Google's human rater guidelines and read this very long document that's been thought fully crafted for decades now around what makes great information. This is something Google has studied more than anyone.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Jeeves was surprisingly prescient on that, huh? It's like they like had something way before its time that we have folks have rallied around now.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we found is that people are asking these questions in Google, like they're trying to get this out of Google. And so if you can just have an AI that's powerful enough to answer really hard calculations someone's trying to figure out or like take a picture of multiple choice homework question for a chemistry question, people are doing this. And so now that you have this really sophisticated AI that's based on our frontier models, we can just handle increasingly more and more stuff for people. And so hopefully that's like a more natural on-ramp here. And then we just need to make it easy enough for people to use because these are new products. And people are used to using Google in a specific way. They type in keywords. We tell people sometimes keyword ease. But you can actually use natural language in Google. That's the biggest shift we're seeing. People asking real, long, hard, complex questions because you just don't think, oh, I can go to Google and type in, what's a great place for a date night? I already went to these four restaurants. I'm looking for outdoor dining. And my friend has this allergy. You could put that into Google. And I think that's the kind of thing that we're excited to continue to.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there's an opportunity for these to come closer together. I think that's what AI mode represents, at least for the core AI experiences. But I think them is very complementary to the core search product. And so you should be able to not have to think about where you're asking a question ultimately. You should just go to Google. And today, if you put in whatever you want, we're actually starting to use much of the power behind AI mode, write an AI overviews. So you can just ask really hard, you could put a five-sentence question right into Google search. You can try it. And then it should trigger AI at the top, it's a preview, and then you can go deeper into AI mode and have this back and forth. So that's how these things connect. Same for your camera. So if you take a picture of something, what's this plant? Or how do I buy these shoes? It should take you to an AI little preview. And then if you go deeper, again, it's powered by AI mode. You can have that back and forth. So you shouldn't have to think about that. It should feel like a consistent, simple product experience ultimately. But obviously, this is a new thing for us. And so we wanted to start it in a way.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two billion times an hour by merchants with live prices. You have 250 million places and maps. You have all of the finance information. I mean, just not to mention, you have the entire context of the web and how to connect to it so that you can get context but then go deeper. And you kind of like put all of that into this brain that is effectively this way to talk to Google and get at this knowledge. And that's really what you can do now. And so you can ask anything on your mind and it'll use all of this information to hopefully give you super high quality and informed information as best as we can. And you can use it directly at this Google.com slash AI, but it's also been integrated into our core experiences too. So we announced you can get to it really easily. If you actually, you can ask follow-up questions of AI overviews right into AI mode now. Same for the lens stuff. Take a picture, takes it to AI mode. So you can have this back. You can ask follow-up questions and go there too.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can tell you, there's kind of three big components to how we can think about AI search and kind of the next generation of search experiences. One is obviously AI overviews, which are the quick and fast AI you get the top of the page. Many people have seen. And that's obviously been something growing very, very quickly. This is when you ask a natural question, you just put it into Google, you get this AI now. It's really helpful for people. The second is around multimodals. This is visual search and lens. That's the other big piece you go to the camera in Google app, and that's seeing a bunch of growth. And then really with AI mode, it really brings it all together. It creates an end-to-end frontier search experience on state-of-the-art models to really truly let you ask anything of Google search. You can go back and forth. You can have a conversation. And it taps into and is specially designed for search. So what does that mean? And one of the cool things that I think it does is it's able to understand all of this incredibly rich information that's within Google. So there's 50 billion products in the Google Shopping graph, for instance. They're updated.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At a massive scale, it's like billions and billions and billions of searching in that way, but you can take a picture of your shoes. They work and I buy this or take a picture of your homework. Say, I am stuck on question two. And then just take a picture of your bookshelf and say, what are the books I should get based on these books? And AI can help you with those things now. It's just an example of, I think, why there's so much growth left and why we're so excited.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, what's interesting is people come to search for just ridiculously wide set of things, like all kinds of things. They want specific phone number. They want a price for something. They want to get directions. They want to find a payment web page for their taxes. Every possible thing you can imagine. I think the vastness of that is underappreciated by many people. What we see is that it's not changing. AI hasn't really changed those foundational needs in many ways. I think what we're finding is that AI is expansionary. And so there's actually just more and more questions being asked and curiosity that can be fulfilled now with AI. And so that's where you get the growth. And so like the core Google search isn't really changing in my opinion. We're not seeing that, but you're getting this expansion moment. And so what we're seeing is, for example, is you can now take a picture of something and ask about anything you see. And Google Lens, one of the fastest growing products out there, it's growing 70% year over year increase in visual searches, which is already...”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or a single person. I find a lot of this is actually this compounding effect. You think about just every month ruthlessly improving the product or the models and just every day getting better. And then it kind of just hits this tipping point where people just like it. They use it more. They enjoy it. And that's more of the feeling that I've had is just, you know, we've had kind of, I think, the right investment and focus. And then it just hit a moment where people are seeing the effects of that now.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, look, I've been at Google now. This is my second time at Google. So I started at Google in 2007, done a bunch of things in between, and I've been back at Google now. So I can't speak to that whole period, you know, for many, many years back to today. But what I can tell you about how I'm feeling now is just an incredible sense of focus and urgency to deliver great products quickly. And I think that that is in part leadership for sure. I think the people who are, we work very closely with our partners at DeepMind and Google DeepMind. We work very closely, obviously, with across the organization. And there's just an incredible group of people and also an incredible group of researchers and technical thinkers who've been thinking about this for a while. And so when you have that energy, and I think the product teams and the tech, the research groups are working really closely together, we're able to move and we're getting a lot done. And so I don't think there's any one thing that has happened. I think that a lot of times people ascribe a lot of momentum to a one-time”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are really excited about nana banana, to be clear, very much so. But I think also people are recognizing that there's just so many cool things that you can do across the Google set of products. And they become quite powerful. And so I'm always shocked even for things in search people. We think they're very obvious because they sit right in the core search experience. And then on X, I'll go look. And like, oh, I just found out about this AI thing. And it seems very obvious, but I think a lot of people are just discovering quite how powerful these tools are now.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not every great thing is going to be invented by you. Facebook probably created the modern feed, but there's a feed for every single product. At the end of the day, you're kind of just robbing your user base of the opportunity to have a better product.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need to be the physical manifestation of two pieces of things. One is just relentlessness, like just complete effort that is always exerted in a direction of positive productivity. And the second is make things better. You have to always make things better. You're never content”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Core Google search isn't really changing, in my opinion. We're not seeing that. People come to search for just ridiculously wide set of things. They want specific phone number. They want a price for something. They want to get directions. I think the vastness of that is underappreciated by many people. AI is expansionary. There's actually just more and more questions being asked and curiosity that can be fulfilled now with AI.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Google's mission around have any information be universally accessible. It's a very enduring, very motivating thing, and it feels like with the AI moment, we can actually achieve that more than ever before. What I'm feeling now is just an incredible sense of focus and urgency. Things have hit a tipping point where these models are now truly able to deliver for consumers.”
2025-10-10 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Google's AI turnaround: The rise of AI Mode, strategy behind AI Overviews, and their vision for AI-powered search | Robby Stein (VP of Product, Google Search) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source