This is the center of Google.

Gosh, it's hard to remember life before Google.

It changed literally everything.

How we live, how we work, how we communicate, how we get literally anywhere on a googly colored bike.

Google has been the front door of the internet for over two decades.

And now there are so many doors.

Google may not be the first place you go for answers anymore.

So what are they going to do about it?

Hello.

Emily, so good to meet you again.

Good to see you again.

Thanks so much for having us here.

Likewise.

I'm glad you chose a sunny day to come on campus.

Sundar Pichai is at a pivotal moment.

He's the CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet, rising to the top after proving his mettle as a talented product leader and peacemaker.

He runs a tech giant that functions more like a micro-country, overseeing businesses as consequential as YouTube, DeepMind, Cloud, and of course, Search.

Pichai has been carefully crafting a strategy that infuses AI into every corner of the business.

That deliberate planning was met with a surprise from longtime rival Microsoft and OpenAI, whose chatbot seemingly knocked Google off its perch and challenged its cultural relevance.

ChatGPT set off a code red at Google and an industry-wide fever pitch over AI not seen since the dot-com boom.

But for Pichai, the frenzy is just part of the long game.

I saw it's your 20th anniversary.

That's right.

It was last week.

It crept up on me.

Are you coffee or tea?

I'll go for coffee.

How about you?

I'm going to have a green tea.

Does it feel like you've been here for 20 years?

Not quite.

You know, time flies by.

You know, I had my kids right when I started Google too, so the whole thing just flew by.

Google is famous for those out-of-the-box job interview questions.

Do you remember any of yours?

Did you have to figure out how many golf balls fit in a school bus or something like that?

Thank God, no.

You know, but I remember very, very clearly I interviewed on April 1st.

So it was April Fool's Day, 2004.

There was a rumor.

I didn't know whether it had actually happened, but Gmail apparently had launched.

So all my interviews were about Gmail.

People wanted to know what I thought of the product.

And it definitely wasn't a joke.

Definitely.

They actually launched it.

But I never allow...

No products on April Fool's Day.

I think it's too confusing.

You just had a blowout quarter.

The stock jumped more than it has in a long time.

Did that feel like a little bit of vindication or, as they say in cricket, was that the bat-talking?

In many ways, you know, I felt we worked very hard to set up the company for that.

You know, in 2016, one of the first things I did as CEO was to say the company should be AI first.

To me, we are just getting started in the beginning of what I think would be an extraordinary decade of innovation.

And so I'm incredibly excited about it.

AI has been around for decades, but it seems like everything is happening everywhere all at once.

How do you make sense of the frenzy and the scale?

All tech cycles are this way, right?

But this one feels different.

It feels bigger, is it?

It is bigger.

We still have long ways to go, but we are in the early stages of that.

And so, you know, you're going to feel that excitement, that frenzy.

But I think we are prepared for it.

So you kind of roll with the flow.

You embrace it.

How are you and your kids experimenting with AI at home?

We use Google Lens for homework.

I don't want to get them in trouble, but the class allows you to do that.

But sometimes he asks me for help on math.

I don't know, sometimes I'm lazy and I pretend as if I'm thinking, but I'm also using Google Lens to kind of figure out the answer.

You grew up in Chennai, in India.

What was it like at the kitchen table?

Like what got you here?

My parents always emphasized, you know, learning and knowledge, and it's what in some ways Google with its mission, you know, always resonated very deeply with me.

You know, I felt this quest for learning, knowledge, et cetera, is what the company is about too.

I grew up in a middle class family.

I perceived our life through the arrival of gadgets and waited five years for a telephone.

It was a rotary phone.

But when it came to our home, you know, it changed everyone's lives.

I remember getting our first television and suddenly being able to watch sports.

You know, I used to bike a long way to school, but, you know, there was no gear in the bike and I had to go up hill.

But then after many years, I got a bike with gears and like, I'm like, wow, this thing makes, you know, what a dramatic difference.

I never took technology for granted.

And so that's what, you know, always been optimistic about how technology can make a You've been CEO now for a decade.

How have you changed in that time?

I think the main thing is when you've done it for a while, you know, you get to understand patterns.

So you're running into something, but there's a sense of deja vu, you know, you've seen it before.

And so I think that helps you kind of pattern match and deal with it more effectively.

But a lot of this is, you know, at this scale, you have so much coming at you.

There's a lot of noise and most of it doesn't matter.

So the ability to separate the signal from the noise, pay attention to the few things that you need to pay attention to and, you know, I think I've gotten better at that over the years.

I heard Sergey is back and working a bit on AI.

What is the involvement of Larry and Sergey these days and what advice are they giving you?

I talk to them regularly.

Sergey is actually spending more time in the office.

He's literally coding and, you know, some of my fondest memories over the last year is sitting with Sergey on large screen, looking at loss curves as we train these models.

I think one of the advantages they have is they're not caught up in the day to day.

So sometimes when I have conversations with them, it allows all of us to step back and look at the bigger picture, which I think is incredibly important when you're on something at this scale.

The decisions Pichai and Google make influence how billions of people get information.

And the nature of how users do that is starting to change in the age of AI.

This seems like a threat to Google, except the core technology being used by Google's competitors was invented by Google itself.

Google researchers invented the transformer, literally the T in GPT.

Do you wish you capitalized on that louder and sooner?

We use transformers in search.

That's what led to large gaps in search quality compared to other products.

So we have infused transformers across our products.

We have a chance to do that better with generative AI and with the Gemini series of models.

And there's going to be more breakthroughs in this field.

But what is more important is we are driving that progress.

And if the new Google is only going to be more and more AI, you know, AI is super helpful sometimes, but sometimes it's still deeply wrong.

Where do you draw the line?

I think part of what makes Google search differentiator is while there are times we give answers, it will always link to a wide variety of sources.

We've had answers in search now for many, many years.

We are just now using generative AI to do that.

So the links will live on.

Yes.

And, you know, I think it'll always be an important part of search.

There will be times when they want quick answers.

My son is celiac, so we did a quick question to see whether something is gluten free.

We just want to know.

But often it leads to more things and, you know, then you want to explore more.

I think understanding that, meeting all that needs is part of what makes search unique.

Some leading computer scientists have said search is getting worse, more SEO spam, etc.

Do you see their point?

Anytime there's a transition, you get an explosion of new content and AI is going to do that.

So for us, we view this as the challenge.

And I actually think, you know, there'll be people who will struggle to do that, right?

So doing that well is what will define a high quality product.

And I think it's going to be the heart of what makes search successful.

You make a ton of money on ads next to the links generated by searches.

If a chatbot is giving you answers and not links, and maybe more answers than links sometimes, are we in the midst of an assault on Google's business model?

So we've always found people want choices, including in commercial areas.

And that's a fundamental need.

And I think we've always been able to balance it.

As we are rolling out AI overviews in search, we've been experimenting with ads.

And the data we see shows that those fundamental principles will hold true during this phase as well.

The images that Gemini initially generated of Asian Nazis and black founding fathers, you said that was unacceptable.

If you look at any pictures of the founding fathers, you're seeing old white men.

People are calling this woke AI.

And it's not just happening here, it's happening across the industry.

How did the model generate something that it never saw?

We are a company which serves products to users around the world.

And there are generic questions.

For example, people come and say, show me images of schoolteachers or doctors or nurses.

We have people asking this query from Indonesia or the US.

How do you get it right for our global user base?

Obviously, the mistake was that we over applied, including cases where it should have never applied.

So that was the bug.

And, you know, so we got it wrong.

Would you say it's like good intentions gone awry?

In this particular case, yes.

Right.

I think, you know, we are rightfully held to a high bar.

And I think we clearly take responsibility for it.

And we're going to get it right.

How concerned are you about AI generated content ruining search?

For example, the AI generated selfie of the tank man in Tiananmen Square.

It shows up in Google search results, but it never happened.

The challenge for everyone and the opportunity is how do you have a notion of what's objective and real in a world where there's going to be a lot of synthetic content?

I think it's part of what will define search in the next decade ahead.

People often come to Google right away to see whether something they saw somewhere else actually happened.

It's a common pattern we see.

We are making progress, but it's going to be an ongoing journey.

You've got AI systems that are running out of training data.

You've got companies turning to AI generated data to train their models.

Aren't there risks to that?

Yes, I think that, you know, through it all, are you creating new knowledge?

Are these models developing reasoning capabilities, right?

Are you making progress in the intelligence of these models?

I think those are the frontiers.

We need to prove that, you know, you can do that by using these techniques.

Is LLM technology nearing a plateau?

I would be surprised if LLMs are the only thing we would need to make progress.

We are investing a lot of computing and resources, our AI researchers' talent, in driving the next generation set of breakthroughs.

It seems when you look at the big picture, like Google missed the big moment and Chachi Pt took it.

A new artificial intelligence program called ChatGPT made its debut online.

It's as revolutionary as the internet.

The topic of today's Big Take is also Microsoft and its big bet on AI and how it just kind of leapfrogged over Google and no one kind of knew about it until now.

If you could go back, what would you do differently?

To be clear, I take a long-term perspective and say, when the internet just first came about, Google didn't even exist then, right?

So we were in the first company to do search.

We were in the first company to do email.

We were in the first company to build a browser.

So I view this AI as, you know, we are in the earliest possible stages.

Your leadership style has been described as slow and steady and cautious, sometimes maybe too cautious.

And you're often compared to these other tech leaders who are moving fast and breaking things.

How would you describe yourself?

Look, the reality, I think, is quite different.

One of the first things I did when I became a CEO was to pivot the company sharply to focus on AI, as well as really invest more in YouTube and cloud to build them into big businesses.

I think the larger the company is, you are making fewer consequential decisions, but they need to be clear and you have to point the whole company to that.