YouSaid · the spoken record

Sundar Pichai

lines on the record: 101
first: 2025-06-05
most recent: 2025-06-05
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

“I've always 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 born now or any other time in the past? I most often, not most often, almost always. Would rather be born now, right? And so that's the extraordinary thing that human civilization has accomplished. And we've kind of constantly made the world a better place. And so something tells me as humanity, we always rise collectively. Drive that frontier forward. So I expect it to be no different in the future”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both the right new questions to ask and the answers to them and the self discovery process, which it will drive, I think our early work with both co-scientists and Alpha Evolve just is super exciting to see.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think In the essence of humanity, there's something about, you know, Consciousness we have, what makes us uniquely human, maybe the lines will blur over time. And it's tough to articulate. But I hopefully we live in a world where if you make resources more plentiful, And make the world lesser of a zero-sum game over time, right? 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 is the aspirational hope I have.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many years ago, there was a, I think it was a mighty study, they just estimated the impact of Google search. And they basically said it's the equivalent to on a per person basis. It's few thousands of dollars per year per person, right? Like is the value that got created per year. But it's tough to capture these things, right? You kind of take it for granted as these things come and the frontier keeps moving. But how do you measure the value of something like alpha fold over time?”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think There is some chance it'll kind of understand you in a very deep way, I think, in a profound way. That's a possibility. I think there is also the obvious thing maybe it helps us understand the universe better in a way that expands the frontiers of our understanding of the world. That is something super exciting. But look, I really don't know. I think I haven't had access to something that powerful yet. But I think those are all possibilities.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A great question Maybe it's proactive by then and should tell me a few things I should know. But I think if I were to ask it, I think it'll help us understand ourselves much better In a way that will surprise us, I think. And so maybe that's you already see people do it with the products. But in an AGI context, I think that'll be pretty powerful.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good moonshot, you know. I love it. It's crazy. But I think we are, but it's Closer to reality than other moonshots. We expect to have glasses in the hands of developers later this year and consumer science next year. So it's an exciting time.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think XR is one way it'll kind of really come to life. But I think there's an opportunity to rethink the mobile OS too, right? I think we've been kind of living in this paradigm of Apps and shortcuts, all that won't go away. But again, if you're trying to get stuff done at an operating system level, It needs to be more agentic so that you can kind of describe what you want to do or proactively understands what you're trying to do, learns from how you're doing things over and over again, and kind of is adapting to you, all that is kind of like the unlock we need to go and do.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best innovations in computing have come when you're through a paradigm I.O. change, right? Like with GUI and then with a graphical user interface and then with multi-touch in the context of mobile voice later on. Similarly, I feel like AR is that next paradigm. I think it was held back both the system integration challenges of making good AR is very, very hard. The second thing is you need AI to actually kind of Otherwise, the IO is too complicated for you to have a natural, seamless I.O. to that paradigm, AI ends up being super important. Why Project Astra ends up being super critical for that Android XR world. But it is, I think when you use glasses and always been amazed at the how useful these things are going to be. So look, I think it's a real opportunity for Android.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do if you have a passion for computer science, I would. Computer science is obviously a lot more than programming alone. So I would. I still don't think I would change what you pursue. I think AI will horizontally allow impact. Every field, it's pretty tough to predict in what ways. So, any education in which you're learning good first principles thinking I think is good education.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Such a good question. Look, I do think. We are making sure We'll introduce at least one round of in person interviews for people. Just to make sure the fundamentals are there, I think they'll end up being important. But it's an equally important skill. Look, if you can use these tools to generate better code, like that's an asset. And so I think overall, I think it's a massive positive.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About migrations, refactoring old coal bases. Yeah, I mean, think about once we can do all this in a much better, more robust way than where we are today.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actual productivity, right? Engineering productivity, which is two different things, which is the more important metric. But I think it'll get better. And I think there's no engineer who tomorrow he magically became 2x more productive. Just going to create more things. You're going to create more value added things. And so I think you'll find more satisfaction in your job, right?”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The big unlock will be as we make the agentic capabilities much more robust. Right. I think that's what unlocks that next big The 10% is like a massive number. If tomorrow I showed up and said, Can improve a large organization's productivity by 10% when you have tens of thousands of engineers. That's a phenomenal number. And that's different than what other site as statistics saying, like this percentage of code is now written by AI. I'm talking more about overall products.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are aspects which are so much fun, your designing, your architecting, you're solving a problem. There's a lot of grant work, 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. Second, I think it'll attract 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 it feels positive that way to me, at least speaking from within a Google context is how I would.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A few things looking at Google We've given various stats around like A 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? And it's tough to measure and we kind of rigorously try to measure it. And our estimates are at that number is now at 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 even an engineering encoding.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There'll be important moments like it should be today if you write a card in your own handwriting and send it to someone that's a special thing. Similarly, there'll be a time to your friends, maybe your friend wrote and said he's not doing well or something, those are moments you want to save your times for writing something, reaching out, but like saying, give me all the details of the trip you took to me makes a lot of sense for AI assistant to help you, right? So I think both are important, but I think I'm excited about that direction.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is what makes this moment so unique because running a company for the first time, you can do one investment in a very deep horizontal way on top of it. You can drive multiple businesses forward. And that's effectively what we are doing in Google and Alphabet.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a while, I mean, the hardware has made extraordinary progress. The software had been the challenge, but with AI now and the generalized models we are building, we are building these models, getting them to work in the real world in a safe way, in a generalized way is the frontier we're pushing pretty hard”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is in the Google Deep Pind team is very focused on Gemini robotics. So we are definitely building The underlying models well. So we have a lot of investments there, and I think we are also pretty cutting edge in our research there. So we are definitely driving that direction. We obviously are thinking about applications in robotics. We'll kind of work seriously. We are partnering with a few companies today. But it's an area I would say stay tuned. We are yet to fully articulate our plans outside. But it's an area where definitely committed to driving a lot of progress. But I think AI ends up driving that massive progress in robotics. The field has been held back.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not something I question. But I think we are so far from these spaces. Such vast spaces Transportation, the opportunity space, the way more driver is a general purpose technology we can apply in many situations. So you have a vast green space in all future scenarios. I see Tesla doing well and way more doing well”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are one of the earliest and biggest backers of SpaceX as Google. So thrilled with what SpaceX is doing and fortunate to be Investors as a company there. And look, we don't compete with Tesla directly. We are not making cars, et cetera, right? We are building L45 autonomy. We're building a Waymo driver, which is general purpose and can be used in many settings. They're obviously working on making Tesla self-driving too. I've just assumed it's a de facto that Elon would succeed in whatever it does.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made the decision to invest more and we more, right? So in some ways it's counterintuitive. But I think, look, we've always been a deep technology company and Vaymo is a version of kind of building an AI robot that works well. And so we get attracted to problems like that, the caliber of the teams there, phenomenal teams. And so I know you follow the space super closely. I'm talking to someone who knows the space well. But it was very obvious it's going to get there. And there's still more work to do. But it's a good example where we always prioritized. Being ambitious and safety at the same time And equally committed to both and pushed hard and couldn't be more thrilled with how it's working, how much people love the experience. And this year has definitely, we've scaled up a lot and will continue scaling up in 26.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although really proud of the progress we have had with Waymo. One of the things I think we were very committed to, the final 20% can look like we always say, right? The first 80% is easy, the final 20% takes 80% of the time. I think we're definitely, we're working through that phase with Vaymo. But I was aware of that. But we knew we were at that stage. We knew we were the technology gap between, well, there were many people, many other self-driving companies. We knew the technology cap was there. In fact, right at the moment when others were doubting Weimo is when”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, this is something Larry and Sergei articulated clearly. I really internalized this early on, which is their whole feeling around working on moonshots. Like as a way, when you work on something very ambitious, first of all, it attracts the best people. So that's an advantage you get. Number two, because it's so ambitious, you don't have others working on something crazy. So you pretty much have the path to yourselves. It's like way more on self driving. Number three, it is even if you end up quite not accomplishing what you set out to do and you end up doing 60, 80% of it, you'll end up being a terrific success. So that's the advice I would give people, right? I think it's just aiming for big ideas has all these advantages and it's risky, but it also has all these advantages, which people I don't think fully internalize.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, Eric, who was the CEO at the time, I think it was less than he was supposed to it. He kind of firsthand knew what a crazy thing it is to go build a browser. And so he definitely was like, this is, there was a crazy aspect to actually wanting to go build a browser, but he was very supportive, you know, everyone, the founders were, I think once we started building something and we could use it and see how much better From then on you're really tinkering with the product and making it better, it came to life pretty fast.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Highly biased person here talking about Chrome, but it's the most fun I've had building a product from the ground up and it was an extraordinary team. My co-founders in a project with Terrific, so definite fond memories.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a clear vision for building a browser. We wanted to bring core OS principles into the browser, right? So we built a secure browser sandbox. Each tab was its own. These things are common now, but at the time it was pretty unique. We found an amazing team in Aarhus, Denmark with a leader who built a V8, the JavaScript VM. At the time, it was 25 times faster than any other JavaScript VM out there. And by the way, you're right, we open sourced it all and put it in Chromium too. But we really thought the web could work much better, much faster. And you could be much safer browsing the web. And the name Chrome came was because we literally felt people were like the Chrome of the browser was getting clunkier. We wanted to minimize it. And so that was the origins of the project. Definitely, obviously”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Such a dynamic time in around 2004, 2005 with Ajax, the web suddenly becoming dynamic in a matter of few months, Flickr, Gmail, Google Maps all kind of came into existence, right? Like the fact that you have an interactive dynamic web, the web was evolving from simple text pages, simple HTML to rich dynamic applications. At the same time, you could see the browser was never Meant for that world, right? Like JavaScript execution was super slow. The browser was far away from being an operating system for that rich modern web, which was coming into place. So that's the opportunity we saw. It's an amazing early team. I still remember the day we got a shell on WebKit running and how fast it was.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think both will coexist. And obviously, the agents may not need the same, I mean, not may not, they won't need the same design and the UI paradigms which humans need to interact with. But I think both will be there.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like not everyone does, but you go to a big retail store, you love walking the aisle, you love shopping. Or grocery store, picking out food, etc. But you're also online shopping and they're delivering. So both are complementary. And like that's true for restaurants, et cetera. So, I do feel like over time, websites will also get better for humans. They will be better design. AI might actually design them better for humans. So I expect the web to get a lot richer and more interesting and better to use. Same time, I think there'll be an agentic web Which is also making a lot of progress. And you have to solve the business value and the incentives to make that work well, right? Like for people to participate in it.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like they're all super important things. I think it's good that you get a lot of crowd sourced information coming in. I feel like there is real value for high quality journalism, right? And I think these are all complementary. I think I view it as I find myself constantly seeking out also try to find objective reporting on things too. And sometimes you get more context from the crowdfunded sources you read online. But I think both end up playing a super important role.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think news and journalism will play an important role in the future. We are pretty committed to it, right? And so I think making sure that ecosystem, in fact, I think we'll be able to differentiate ourselves as a company over time because of our commitment there. So it's something I think I definitely value a lot. And as we are designing, we'll continue prioritizing approaches.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It helps us deliver higher quality referrals, right? Where people are, like they have much higher likelihood of finding what they're looking for, they're exploring, they're curious, their intent is getting satisfied more. So that's what all our metrics show.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our current plan is AI mode is going to be there as a separate tab for people who really want to experience that, but it's not yet at the level where our main search page is. But as features work, we'll keep migrating it to the main page. And so you can view it as a continuum. AI modal offer you Things that work will keep overflowing. AI overviews and the main experience”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so there are aspects of that, but I think the underlying need of people value commercial information, businesses are trying to connect to users, all that doesn't change in AI moment. But look, we will rethink it. You've seen us in YouTube now do a mixture of subscription and ads. Like obviously We are now introducing subscription offerings across everything. And so as part of that, we can optimization point will end up being at different places as well.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things early part of AI mode will obviously focus more on the organic experience to make sure we are getting it right. The fundamental value of ads, or it enables access to deploy the services to billions of people. Second, his ads are the reason we've always taken ads seriously is we view ads as commercial information, but it's still information. And so we bring the same quality metrics to it. I think with AI mode, to our earlier conversation about, I think AI itself will help us Over time, figure out the best way to do it. I think given we are giving context around everything, I think it will give us more opportunities to also explain, okay, here's some commercial information. Like today as a podcaster, you do it at certain spots and you probably figure out what's best in your podcast.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. I mean, the multimodality, the translation, its ability to reason, we are dramatically improving tool use. So putting that power in the flow of search, I think, look, I'm super excited with AI overviews. We've seen the product has caught on much better. We measured using all kinds of user metrics. It's obviously driven strong growth of the product. You know, we've been testing AI mode. 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.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, 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 that's how we think about it.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, in some ways, when mobile came, people wanted answers to more questions. So we've kind of constantly evolving it. But you're right, this moment, that evolution, because the underlying technology is becoming much more capable. You can have AI give a lot of context. 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. 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.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that was a very important decision for the company to meet the moment. I think we had to make sure we were doing that and doing that well. I think that was a consequential decision. There were many other things. We set up an AI infrastructure team to really go meet the moment to scale up the compute. We needed to and really brought teams from disparate parts of the company kind of created it to move forward. Bringing people, like carrying people to kind of work together physically both in London with DeepMind and what we call gradient canopy, which is where the mountain view Google DeepMind teams are. But one of my favorite moments is I routinely walk multiple times per week to the grading canopy building where our top researchers are working on the models. Sergei is often there amongst them, right? Just looking at Getting an”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's putting the foot down or it's a natural part of what all of us have to do. And I think you can do that calmly and be very firm in the direction you're making the decision. And I think if you're clear, actually people over time respect that, right? Like, you know, if you can make decisions with clarity, I find it very effective in meetings where you're making such decisions to hear everyone out. I think it's important when you can. to hear everyone out. Sometimes what you're hearing actually influences how you think about and you're wrestling with it and making a decision. Sometimes you have a clear conviction and you state so, look, I This is how I feel, this is my conviction, and you kind of place the bet and you move on.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My earlier point about consequential decisions you make, there are decisions you make, people can disagree pretty vehemently. But at some point you make a clear decision and you just ask people to commit. You can disagree, but it's time to disagree and commit so that we can get mowing.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably, right? I think in the sense that it was a moment where we were all driving hard. But when you're on the trenches working with passion, Going to have days, right? You disagree, you argue, but like all that, I mean, just part of the course of working intensely. And, you know, at the end of the day, all of us are doing what we are doing because the impact it can have, we are motivated by it. It's like, you know, for many of us, this has been a long-term journey. And so it's been super exciting. The positive moments far outweigh the kind of stressful moments just early this year. I had a chance to celebrate back tobacco over two days. Like, you know, Nobel Prize for Jeff Finton. And the next day Nobel Prize for Demis and John Jumper, you worked with people like that. All that is super inspiring.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that it works well for the long term, right? And some of that in that moment, I think, yes, with things moving fast, I think you definitely felt the pressure. But I think we pulled off that transition well. And I think they've obviously doing incredible work. And there's a lot more incredible things ahead coming from them.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writing through those moments, luckily tapping into Jeff had expressed a desire to be more, to go back to more of a scientific individual contributor roots. He felt like management was taking up too much of his time. And Demes naturally, I think, was running deep mind and was a natural choice there. But I think it was, you're right. It took us a while to bring the teams together, credit to Demis, Jeff, Korai, all the great people there. They worked super hard to combine the best of both worlds when you set up that team. A few sleepless nights here and there as we put that thing together. We were patient in how we did it.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were fortunate to have two world-class teams, but you're right, it's like somebody coming and telling to you, take Stanford and MIT. Right. And then put them together and create a great department, right? And easier said than done. But we are fortunate in a phenomenal teams both had their strengths. They were run very differently. Brain was kind of a lot of diverse projects, bottoms up, and out of it came a lot of important research breakthroughs. DeepMind at the time had a strong vision of how you want to build AGI. And so they were pursuing their direction.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 better than most companies in the world to go realize that vision.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But internally, you're making a set of consequential decisions. As leaders, you're making a lot of decisions. Many of them are inconsequential. It feels like, but over time you learn that. Most of the decisions you're making on a day-to-day basis doesn't matter. Like, 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? 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 NFTPUs to get the compute needed. I could see internally the trajectory we were on.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A few aspects. I'm good at tuning out noise, separating signal from noise. Do you cuba dive? It's amazing. I'm not good at it, but I've done it a few times. Sometimes you jump in the ocean, it's so choppy You go down one feet under, it's the calmest thing in the entire universe, right? So there's a version of that, right? Running Google. You may as well be coaching Barcelona or Real Madrid. Have a bad season. So there are aspects to that. But look, I'm good at tuning out the noise. I do watch out for signals. 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.”
2025-06-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #471 – Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source