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personalize your policies for your small business needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Talk to your local agent today. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Appetel, Editor and Chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking to Alphabet and Google's CEO Sundar Pichai, who joined this show day after the big Google IO developer conference. His focus during that conference was very much on AI, and how the company is building AI
into virtually all of its products. My personal favorite was the new AI search in Google Photos that lets you just ask things like, what's my license plate number? And get an answer back from your entire photo library. All in all, Google executives said AI more than 120 times during the keynote. We counted. But there was one particular announcement at IO that's
sending shockwaves around the web. Google is rolling out what it calls AI overviews and search to everyone in the United States by this week, and then around the world to more than a billion users by the end of the year. That means when you search for something on Google, you'll get AI-powered results at the top of the page for a number of queries. The company literally describes this as, let Google do the googling for you. A version
of this called the search generative experience has been in testing for about a year now. So you might have seen riffs on this, but now AI previews are here, and they will change the web as we know it. And I don't think that's just me reacting hyper-ballotally. A bunch of people who make websites feel the same way. As an example, the news media alliance, which represents a bunch of fancy publishers, put out a press release calling AI previews
and search, quote, catastrophic to our traffic. If you're a decoder listener, you've heard me talk about this idea a lot over the past year. I've been calling it Google zero. And I've been asking a lot of web and media CEOs what would happen to their businesses if their Google traffic goes to zero. And I mean that question sincerely. If AI chat bots and AI powered search results do a good job of just delivering people answers to their
questions. Why would anyone go to a website? And if we all stop going to websites, what's the incentive to put new content on the web? And what's going to stop shady content farms from flooding the web with AI generated spam to try and game these systems? And if the incentives to make good content on the web go down and the incentives to flood the web with AI spam go up, what are all these bots going to summarize when people ask them questions?
AI is a big idea. It's going to cause some big problems. Sooner has some ideas about this, of course. For one, he's not convinced that the web, which he says he cares deeply about, is in all that much long term danger. You'll hear him mention Wired's famous 2010 headline, the web is dead. And he makes the argument that new transformative technologies like AI always cause short term disruption. Sooner also says that injecting AI into search
is about creating value for Google's users. And those users are telling him that they find these new features to be helpful. And they even click on links in those AI previews at higher rates, potentially sending out more traffic than before. But he didn't say where that leaves the people who put the content on the internet in the first place. We really sat with that idea for a while. And we talked a lot about the anger that created people
feel towards AI systems training on their work. I've talked to soon there quite a bit over the past few years. And this was the most fired up I think I've ever seen him. You can really tell there's a deep tension between the vision that Google and others have for the future where AI makes us smarter and more productive and more artistic. And the very real fears and anxieties that creators and website owners feel right now about
how search has changed and how AI might swallow the internet forever. And sooner is really wrestling with that tension. It was a good conversation. Oh, one note before we start. You'll hear me say to Sundar that I think he keeps making oblique references to open AI and he pushes back on me pretty strongly. That's the thing about afterwards. And it's pretty clear he wasn't just talking about open AI, but also meta, which has explicitly turned
away from sending any traffic to any websites whatsoever. And has also been clear that it doesn't really want to support news and its platforms at all. I wish that had clicked for me during this conversation because I would have asked about it way more directly. Okay, alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pachai. Here we go. Sundar Pachai, you are the CEO of alphabet and Google. Welcome to decoder. And like good to be here. I'm excited to talk to you. I feel like I talked to you every year at Google
I.O. When we talk about all the things you've announced, there's a lot of things to talk about. There's a lot of AI news talk about as you know, I am particularly interested in the future of the web. I really want to talk about that with you. But I figured I would start with an easy one. Do you think language is the same as intelligence? Wow, that's a sound easy question. I don't think I'm the expert on it. I think language
does encode a lot of intelligence. Probably more than people thought explains the success of large language models to a great extent. But I think my intuition tells me as humans the way we consume information. I think there's a lot more to it than language alone. But I'd say language is a lot more than people think. Yeah. It is. Yeah. The reason I ask that question is start is I look at the announcement that I owe with AI and what you're doing. I look at your competitors with AI and what you're
doing. And everything is very language heavy, right? It's LOMs that have really led to this explosion of interest and innovation and investment. And I wonder if the intelligence is increasing at the same rate as the facility with language. And I kind of don't see it to be perfectly honest. I see computers getting much better at language. And actually in some cases getting done. And I'm wondering if you see that same gap.
It's a great question though. Part of the reason we made Gemini natively multimodal is so that you know, this audio video text images encode. And you're beginning to seek glimpses of it now. But it doesn't all actually made its way into products fully yet. So maybe the next cycle when we have multimodality working on the input and output side and we are training models using all that. I think that will encapsulate a lot more than just today,
which is primarily text based. So I think that continuum will shift as we, you know, taken a lot more information that way. So maybe there's there's more to come. The reason I asked that is it feels like last year, you know, the tagline was bold but responsible that school approach. You said it again on stage this year. And then I look at our reactions to AI getting things wrong. And it seems like they're getting more and more tempered over
time. I'll give you an example. And the demos you had yesterday, you showed multimodal video search of someone trying to fix a broken film camera. And the answer was just wrong. Right. Like sort of straightforwardly the answer that was highlighted in the video was just open the back of the film camera and jiggle it or and it's like, well, that would ruin all of your film. And no one who had an intelligent understanding of how that camera would just
suggest that. You know, ironically, I was talking to the team. They, you know, the team as part of making the video. They consulted with a bunch of subject matter experts who all reviewed the answer and thought it was okay. I understand the nuance. I agree with you. Obviously, you don't want to expose your film by taking it outside of a dark room. There are certain contexts in which it makes sense to do that. You know, if you don't
want to break the camera and if what you've taken is not that valuable. All right. It makes sense to do that. You know, it's a good example of you're right. There is a lot of nuance in it. And you know, part of what I hope search serves to do is to give you a lot more context and around that answer and allows people to explore it deeply. But I think, you know, these are the kind of things for us to keep getting better at. But the earlier
question, look, I think I do see the capability front here, continuing to move forward. I think we're a bit limited if we were just training on text data, but I think we're all making it more multimodal. So I see more opportunities there. Yeah. Let's talk about search. This is the thing that I am most interested in. I think this is the thing that is changing the most sort of in an abstract way. It's the thing that's
the most exciting. Yeah. You can ask a computer a question and it will just like happily tell you an answer. Yeah. That feels new. I see the excitement around it. Yesterday, you announced AI previews are coming to search. That's an extension of what was called the search generative experience announced in a real out everyone in the United States. I would describe the reactions to that news from the people who make websites is fundamentally
apocalyptic. The CEO of the news media alliance said to CNN, this will be catastrophic to our traffic. Another media CEO forwarded me a newsletter and the headline was, this is a death blow to publishers. Were you expecting that kind of response to rolling out AI previews in search? I definitely, you know, I recall in 2010, you know, headlines of the web is dead, right? You know, when I long worked on the web, obviously, I deeply care about it.
And the transition from desktop to mobile happen was a lot of concerns because people are like, oh, it's a small screen. How will people read content? Like, why would they look at content? We had started introducing what we internally called by Bansers in 2014, which have featured snippets outside. So you had questions like that. I remain optimistic empirically
what we are seeing throughout these years. Human curiosity is boundless. Yeah. When people come, and it's something I think we have deeply understood in search more than any other company, I think we will differentiate ourselves in our approach. Even through this transition, I think as a company, we realize the value of this ecosystem and it's symbiotic. If there isn't a rich ecosystem, making unique and useful content, what are you putting together
and organizing? Right. And so we feel it. I would say through all these transitions, things have played out a bit differently. I think high quality content users are looking for it. The counter-induitive part, which I think almost always plays out, is it's not a zero-sum game in terms of AI overviews. People are responding very positively to it. It's one of the most positive changes I've seen in search based on metrics we see. But people do jump off
on it. And when you give context around it, they actually jump off with, it actually helps them understand. And so they engage with content underneath too. In fact, if you put content and links with an AI overviews, they get hired through rates then if you put it outside of AI overviews. Yeah. But I understand the sentiment, right? And as a big change, these are disruptive moments. AI is a big platform shift. And people are projecting out. And
you know, this is people are putting a lot into creating content. It's their businesses. It's their, so I understand the perspective. So, you know, I'm not surprised we are engaging with a lot of players both directly and indirectly. But I remain optimistic how it will actually play out. But it's a good question. Happy to talk about it more. I have this concept, I call Google Zero, which is born of my own paranoia. Every referer
that the Verge has ever had has gone up and then it's gone down. And Google is the last large scale referer traffic on the web for almost every website now. And I can see that for a lot of sites, Google Zero is playing out. Their Google traffic has gone to zero, particularly independent sites that aren't part of some huge publishing conglomerate. So there's an air purifier blog that we cover called House Fresh. There's a gaming site
we cover called RetroDodo. Both of these sites have said, look, our Google traffic went to zero. Our businesses are doomed. Is that the right outcome here of all this? The people who care so much about video games or air purifiers that they actually started websites and made the content for the web or the ones getting hurt the most in the platform
shift. I mean, it's always difficult to talk about individual cases, right? And like, you know, at the end of the day, we are trying to satisfy user expectations and users are voting with their feet and right. So and people are trying to figure out what's valuable to them. And we are doing it at scale. And, you know, I can't answer on the particular side. It's that thing where it's a bunch of small players are feeling hurt like loudly,
they're saying it like our businesses are going away. And that's the thing you're saying. Like we're engaging. We're talking, but this thing that is happening very clearly, but it's not clear to me that's a uniform trend. Like I have to look at data on an aggregate. Right. So anecdotally, when people give space, there are always times when people have
come in an area and said, me as a specific site have done worse. But that may be a moment in which that's because it's like an individual restaurant coming and saying, I've started getting less customers this year. Yeah. People have stopped eating food or whatever it is. Right. That's not true necessarily. Right. Some other restaurant might have opened
next door, which is doing very well. Right. So it's tough to say it in from our standpoint, when I look at historically, even over the past decade, you know, we have provided more traffic to the ecosystem and we've driven that growth. Right. So then, you know, and you may be making a secondary point around small sites versus more aggregating sites, you know, which is the second point you're talking about. You know, ironically, there are times when
we have done changes to actually send more traffic to the smaller sites. Some of the sites which complain a lot are the aggregators in the middle. Yeah. So should the traffic go to the restaurant, which is created a website with their menus and stuff or, you know, or people writing about these restaurants. These are deep questions. I'm not saying there's a right answer. But you're about to flip over the whole apple car, right? You're about
to start answering some of these questions very directly. And where that content comes from in the future, I think you want the people who care the most to publish that information directly to be the thing that you sent this. Yeah. And the incentives for that seem to be getting lower and lower on the web anyway. Yeah. I feel it's all posted. And if anything, I feel like through AI overviews. When you give people context, yes, there are times people
come and all they want is a quick answer and they bounce back. But overall, when we look at user journeys, when you give the context, it also exposes people's to various branching off jumping off points. And so they engage more. So actually, this is what drives growth over time. I look at like desktop to mobile questions were similar. In fact, I think it was a cover almost to pull out saying the web is dead. And there was a Google zero argument
yeah. 10 years ago, it's not an accident. I think we are still remain as one of the largest refers. Yeah. Because we've cared about it deeply for a long, long time. I look at our journey even the last one year through search and rate of experience. I constantly, you know, found us prioritizing approaches, which would send more traffic while meeting user
expectations. We think that through deeply and we actually change our approach. And if there are areas where we feel like we fully haven't gotten it right, we are careful about rolling it there. What's positively surprising us is that people engage more and
that will lead to more growth over time, I think for high quality content. There's a lot of debate about what's high quality content, you know, but I think I would hope that, you know, at least in my experience, you know, I value independent sources, I value smaller things. I want more authentic voices. And I think those are important attributes we are trying to constantly improve. You mentioned that you think more people will click through
links and AI previews. I think Liz, who run search had a blog post making the same claim. There's no public data that says that this is true yet. Are you going to release that data? Are you going to show people that this is actually happening? I don't aggregate. I think people, maybe rely on this value of the ecosystem, right? If people over time on an aggregate, don't see value website, don't see value coming back
from Google. I think we'll pay a price. I think so we have the right incentive structure. But obviously look, I think we're careful about there are a lot of individual variations. And some of it is users choosing which way to go. And so I think I think that part is hard to sort out. But I do think we are committed at an aggregate level to do the right thing. We have to take a quick break. We'll be right back. So Portford E. Coder comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you're used
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slash decoder to learn more. That's vanta.com slash decoder. We're back. I'm talking with Google CEO Sundar Prachai about the difficulty that the shift to AI overviews and search results might cause for website owners and content creators. I was reading some SEO community trade publications this morning responding to the changes. One of the things that was pointed out was that in search console, it doesn't show you if the clicks are coming from a featured snippet or an AI preview or
just a regular Google 10 blue links. Would you break that out? Would you commit to breaking out so people can actually audit and verify and measure that the AI previews are sending out as much traffic as you said they are? I think it's a good question for the search team. They think about this at a deeper level than I do. I think we're constantly trying to give more visibility in a way, but we also don't want people to create the content that's good and we are trying to rank it and organize
it. There's a balance to be had. The more we spec it out, the more people design for that. I think there's a trade off there. It's not created to me with the right answer to this. That trade off will you spec out and say what people make. I think that's been the story of the web for quite some time. It had reached a steady state. Whether you think that steady state was good or bad, it was at least a steady state. Now that state
is changing. AI is obviously changing it. The 10 blue links model that old steady state very much based on an exchange. We're going to let you index our content. We're going to feature snippets. We're going to let you see all of our information in return. You will send us traffic. That formed the basis of what you might call a fair use argument. Google is going to index the stuff. There's not going to be a lot of payments in the middle.
In the AI era, no one knows how that's going to go. There are some major lawsuits happening. There are deals being made by Google Open AI for training data. Do you think it's appropriate for Google to start making more deals to pay for data to train search results? Those AI snippets are not really the same as the 10 blue links or anything else you've done
in the past. To be very clear, there's a myth that Google has searched has been 10 blue links for a, you know, like, you know, I look at our mobile experience over many, many years, right? And we've had answers. We allow you to refine questions and so on. We've had featured snippets and so on. So the product has evolved significantly. But having said that as a company, even as we look at AI, you know, we've done even we've had showcase,
we have done licensing deals. To the extent there is value, we obviously think there is a case for fair use in the context of beneficial transformative use. Not going to argue with that with you as a given your background. But I think there are cases in which we will see the dedicated incremental value to our models and, you know, we'll be looking at partnerships to get at that. Yeah. So I do think we'll approach it that way.
Well, I missed this question in a different way. And I won't do too much fair use analysis with you. I promise as much as I like doing it. Yeah. There are some news reports recently that OpenAI had trained its video generation products so on YouTube. How did you feel when you heard that news? Look, we don't know the details. Our YouTube team is following up and trying to understand. We have terms and conditions, right? And we would expect people to abide by
those terms and conditions, right? And so I think when you build a product and so that's how I felt about it, right? You know, I think so you felt like they had broken your terms and conditions or potentially if they had that wouldn't have been appropriate. That's right. Yeah. That's right. So the reason I asked that question, which is a much more emotional question is,
okay, maybe that's not appropriate. And what OpenAI has said, whatever they've said is essentially in the order of we trained on publicly available information, which means we found it on the web. Most people don't get to make that deal, right? They don't have a YouTube team of licensing professionals who can say we had terms and conditions. They don't even have terms and conditions.
They're just putting their stuff on the internet. Do you understand why emotionally there's the reaction to AI from the creative community that it feels the same way as you might have felt about OpenAI training on YouTube? Absolutely. Look, I think beat website owners or content creators
or artists, you know, I can understand how emotional a transformation this is. And I think part of the reason you saw even through Google IO when we were working on products like music generation, we've really taken an approach by which we are working first to make tools for artists. We haven't put a general purpose tool out there for anyone to create songs, right? So the way we have taken that approach in many of these cases is to put the creator community as much as the
center of it as possible. We've long done that with YouTube. Through it all, I think we are trying to figure out what are the right ways to approach this. But it is a transformative moment as well. And there are other players in this. You're not the only player in the ecosystem, but to your earlier question, yes, I understand people's emotions through it. I definitely am very empathetic to how people are perceiving this moment. Because they feel like it's a taking, right? They put work
on the internet and the big companies are coming. They're taking it for free. And then they're making products that you are charging 20 bucks a month for or that will lift their creative work and remix it for other people. The thing that makes it feel like a taking is very little value accrues back to them. And that's really the thing I'm asking about is how do you bring a value back to them? How do you bring incentives back to the small creator, the independent business?
It's like look, this feels like a taking. The whole reason we have spent, I think we've been successful on platforms like YouTube as we've worked hard to answer this question well. Yeah. Right. And so you'll continue to see as dig deep about how to do this well. And I think the players who end up doing better here will have more winning strategies over time.
I genuinely believe that. And I think across everything we do, we have to sort that out. Anytime you're running a platform, I think it's the basis on which you can build a sustainable long-term platform. So I view that through this AI moment over time, there'll be players who will do better by the content creators, which support their platforms and who does it better with the emergence of winners. I believe that to be a tenant in these things over time.
One thing that I think is really interesting, the YouTube comparison in particular, it's been described to you many times that YouTube is a licensing business. You license a lot of content from the creators, you obviously pay them back in terms of the advertising model there, the music industry has a huge licensing business with YouTube. It is an existential relationship, I think, for both sides. Susan will just use to describe YouTube as a music service, which I
didn't confuse everyone until you looked at the data. Universal music is mad about AI on YouTube. YouTube reacts. They build a bunch of tools, they write a constitution on what AI will do and will not do. People are mad about search generative experience or AI previews on the web. Google doesn't react the same way. I'm wondering if you can start from reality. You think so? That's so far from reality. We have taken, I look at other players and how they've approached.
You're talking about Open Now, which is just out there and taking stuff, right? I look at how in general when you look at how we have approached search generative experience, even through a moment like this, the time we have taken to test, iterate, prioritize approaches. The way we've done it over the years, I would say I definitely disagree with the notion that we don't listen. We deeply care. Not everything we do, people may agree when you're running an
ecosystem, you are balancing across different needs, but I would definitely think. I hope you always do, because I think that's the essence of what makes a product successful. Let me talk about the other side of this. There's search and people are going to game search, and that's always going to happen. That's a chicken egg problem. The other thing I see is happening, is the web is being flooded with AI content. There was an example a few months ago.
Some unsavory SEO character said, here's this thing I just did. I stole a bunch of traffic from a competitor. I copied their site map. I fed it into an AI and had it generate me copy for a website that matched their site map. I put up this website. I stole a bunch of traffic from that website in my competitor. I think that's a bad outcome. I don't think we want to incentivize that in any way, shape or form. That's going to happen at scale, and more and more of the internet that we experience
will be synthetic in some important way. How do you, on the one hand, build the systems that create this synthetic content for people, and on the other hand, rank it so that you're only getting the best stuff. Because at some point, the defining line for a lot of people is, I want stuff made by a human and not stuff made by an AI. I think there are multiple parts to your question, right? So, one, how do we sift through high quality from low quality? I'm like, I literally view that as
our mission statement, it is what has defined search over many, many years. I actually think people underestimate any time you have these disruptive platform shifts. You know, you're going to go through a phase like this. I have seen that teams invest so much, our entire search quality teams have been spending the last year, gearing up our ranking systems, et cetera, to better get at what is high quality content. I think, if I think the next decade, people who can do that better,
who can sift through that, I think will win out. I think you're right in your assessment that, you know, people will value human-created experiences. I hope the data bears that out. And, you know, we have to be careful every time there's a new technology. There are old filmmakers if you go and talk about CGI films, they're going to react very emotionally. Right? And there are still esteemed filmmakers who never use CGI and infelms. But then there are people who use it and produce
great films. Right? And so, you can't just say anything with AI, you know, you may be using AI to lay out enhanced video effects in your video, et cetera. But I agree with you. I think using AI to produce on-mass content without adding any value, et cetera, I don't think is what users are looking for. Yeah. But there is a big continuum. And, you know, over time, users are adapting. We are trying hard to make sure we do it in a responsible way, but also listening to what users
actually find as high quality versus not. Yeah. And trying to get that balanced right, right? And that continuum will look different a few years out than it is today. But I think it's I viewed as the essence of what search quality is. Do I feel confident we will be able to approach it better than others? Yes. Right. And I think that's what defines the work we do. We have to take on a short break. We'll be back in just a few minutes.
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That's van.ta.com slash box. Support for this show comes from Slack. You're a growing business and you can't afford to slow down. If anything, you could probably use a few more hours in the day. That's why the most successful growing businesses are working together in Slack. Slack is where work happens, with all your people,
data, and information in one AI-powered place. Start a call instantly in Huttles and ditch cumbersome calendar invites, or build an automation with workflow builder to take routine tasks off your plate. No coding required. Grow your business in Slack. Visit Slack.com to get started. Welcome back. I'm talking with Google CEO Sundar Peshai, but where all this generative AI is leading us, and ultimately where it might lead the web.
For the listener, these have been a lot of subtle shots at OpenAI today. Can I put this into practice by showing you a search? I actually just did this search. It is a search for best Chromebook. As you know, I once bought my mother a Chromebook pixel. It's one of my favorite tech purchases of all time. This is a search for best Chromebook. I'm going to hit generate at the top. It's going to generate the answer. Then I'm going to do something terrifying, which is I'm going to
hand my phone to the CEO of Google. This is my personal phone. Don't take through it. You look at that. It's the same generation that I've seen earlier. I asked him for best Chromebook. He says, here's some stuff you might think of. Then he scroll. Some Chromebooks doesn't say whether they're the best Chromebooks. Then it's a bunch of headlines. Some of it's like Verge headlines. He's like, here's some best Chromebooks. That feels like the exact kind of thing
that an AI-generated search could answer in a better way. Do you think that's a good experience today? Is that a way pointer? Is that the destination? I think, look, you're showing me acquiring which we didn't automatically generate the AI. There was a button that said, do you want to do it? Let me push back. There's an important differentiation. There's a reason we are giving a view without the generated AI overview. As a user, you're initiating an action. We are respecting the
user intent there. When I scroll at I see Chromebooks, I also see a whole set of links which I can go which tell me all the ways you can think about Chromebooks. I see a lot of links. We both didn't show an AI overview in this case. As a user, you're generating the follow-up question. I think it's right that we respect the user intent. If you don't do that, people will go somewhere else too. I'm saying the answer to the question, I did not write what is the best Chromebook. I
just wrote the best Chromebook. The answer, the thing that identifies itself as an answer is not on that page. The leap to I had to push the button to Google, pushes the button for me, and then says what it believes to be the answer is very small. I'm wondering if you think a page like that today is the destination of the search experience or if this is a waypoint and you can see a future better version of that experience. I'll give you my phone back. I'm tempted to check emails
right now out of habit. I think the direction of how these things will go is fully tough to predict. We are users keep evolving. It's a more dynamic moment than ever. We are testing all of this. This is a case where we didn't trigger the AI overview because we felt like our AI overview is not necessarily the first experience we want to provide for that query because what's underlying is maybe a better first look at the user. Those are all quality trade-offs we are making. But the
user is asking for a summary. We are summarizing and giving links. I think that seems like a reasonable direction to me. I'll show you another one where it did expand automatically. This one I only have screenshots for. This is a Dave Lee from Bloomberg did a search. She got an AI overview and you just searched for JetBlue mint lounge SFO. It just says the answer, which I think is fine. That's the answer.
If you swipe one over, I cannot believe I'm letting this see a Google swipe on my camera roll. But if you swipe one over, you see where it pulled from. You see the site it pulled from. It is a word for word rewrite of that site. This is the thing I'm getting at. The AI generated preview of that answer. If you just look at where it came from, it is almost the same sentence that exists on the source of it.
That's what I mean. It's at some point that the better experience is the AI preview. It's just the thing that exists on all the sites underneath it. It's the same information. Look, the thing with search. We handled billions of queries. You can absolutely find a query and hand it to me and say could we have done better on that query? Yes. For sure. But when I look across, in many cases, part of what is making people respond positively to AI overviews is the summary we are providing clearly
ads value. Helps them look at things they may not have otherwise thought about. If you are an adding value at that level, I think people notice it over time. I think that's a bar you're trying to meet. Our data would show over 25 years. If you aren't doing something that uses find valuable or enjoyable, they let us know. Right away. Over and over again, we see that. And through this transition, everything is the opposite. It's one of the biggest quality
improvements we are driving in our product. People are valuing this experience. So there's a general presumption that people don't know what they are doing. Which I disagree with strongly. People who use Google are savvy. They understand. I can give plenty of examples where I've used AI overviews as a user. I'm like, oh, this is giving context. Oh, maybe there are this dimensions. I didn't even think in my original query. Right. How do I expand upon it and look at it? Yeah.
You've made oblique mention to opening AI a few times, I think. I actually haven't. I think I think you see saying others. There's one other big competitor that is, I think, a little more when you're putting words in my mouth, but that's okay. Yeah. Okay. Well, I would say I saw open AI's demo the other day of GPC 40. Omni. It looked a lot like the demos you gave it. I write this idea of multimodal search. The idea that you have this character you can talk to. You
had gems, which was the same kind of idea. It feels like there's a race to get to kind of the same outcome for a search like experience or an agent like experience. Do you feel the pressure from that competition? Well, I mean, this is no different from city in Alexa and like, you know, we work in the industry. I think when you're working in the technology industry, I think that is relentless innovation. We've felt a few years ago, all of us building voice assistance. You could have
asked the same version of this question, right? And what was Alexa trying to do and what was Siri trying to do? So I think it's a natural extension of that. I think you have a new technology now and it's evolving rapidly. I felt like it was a good week for technology. There was a lot of innovation. I felt on Monday and Tuesday and so on. That's how I feel. And I think it's going to be
that way for a while. I'd rather have it that way. You'd rather be in a place where the underlying technology is evolving, which means you can radically improve your experiences, which you're putting out. I'd rather have that any time than a static face in which you feel like, you know, you're not able to move forward fast. I think a lot of us have had this vision for what a powerful assistant can be. But we were held back by the underlying technology, not being able to
serve that goal. I think we have a technology which is better able to serve that. That's why you're seeing the progress again. So I think that's exciting. To me, I look at it and say we can actually make Google Assistant a whole lot better. You're seeing visions of that with Project Astra. It's incredibly magical to me when I use it. I'm very excited by it. This brings back to the first question asked, language versus intelligence.
To make these products, I think you need a core level of intelligence. Do you have in your head a measure of this is when it's going to be good enough? I can trust this. On all of your demo slides and all of open AI's demo slides, there's a disclaimer that says, check this info. To me, it's ready when you don't need that anymore. You didn't have check this info at the bottom of the 10 blue links. You don't have check this info at the bottom of the featured snippets
necessarily. You're getting at a deeper point where hallucination is still an unsolved problem. In some ways, it's an inherent feature. It's what makes these models very creative. It's why it can immediately write a poem about Thomas Jefferson in the style of Nelaide. It can do that. It's incredibly creative. But LLMs aren't the best approach to always get at factuality, which is part of why I feel excited about search. In search, we are bringing LLMs in a way,
but we are grounding it with all the work we do in search and laying it with enough context. I think we can deliver a better experience from that perspective. But I think the reason you're seeing those disclaimers is because of the inherent nature. There are still times it's going to get it wrong. But I don't think I would look at that and underestimate how useful it can be at the same time.
I think that would be a wrong way to think about it. Google Lens is a good example. When we did Google Lens first, when we put it out, it would get, you know, it didn't recognize all objects well. But the curve we're on here has been pretty dramatic and users are using it more and more. We get billions of queries now. We've had billions of queries now with Google Lens. It's because the underlying image recognition paired with our knowledge entity understanding has dramatically expanded
over time. So I would view it as a continuum. And I think again, I go back to this saying, users vote with their feet, right? Fewer people use Lens in the first year. We also didn't put it everywhere because we realized the limitations of the product. When you talk to the DeepMind, Google Brain team, is there on the roadmap a solution to the hallucination problem? It's Google DeepMind. Are we making progress? Yes, we are. We have definitely made progress.
You know, when we look at metrics on factuality year on year. So we're all making it better. But it's not solved. Are there interesting ideas and approaches which they are working on? Yes. But time will tell, right? But you know, but I would view it as LLMs are an aspect of AI, right? You know, we're working on AI in a much broader way. But it's an area where I think we're all working definitely to drive more progress. Last question. I think it's the theme
of this conversation. Five years to now, this technology, the paradigm shifts will be, will be through it. It feels like, what does the best version of the web look like for you? Five years. I hope the web is much richer in terms of modality. Today, I feel like the way humans consume information, you know, still not fully encapsulated in the web. Today, things exist in very different ways, right? Your web pages, YouTube, etc. But over time, I hope the web is much more
multi-modal. It's much more richer, much more interactive. It is a lot more stateful, which it's not today. So I viewed as while fully up-knowledgeing the point, people may use AI to generate a lot of spam. I also feel every time there's a new way of technology, people quite don't know how to use it. Yeah. When mobile came, everyone took the web pages and like shouted into mobile applications. Then later, people evolved, really native mobile applications. So the way people use AI to
actually solve new things, new use cases, etc., is yet to come. So when that happens, I think the web will be much, much richer too. Dynamically, composing a UI in a way that makes sense for you, right? Different people have different needs, right? But today, you know, you're not dynamically composing that UI. AI can help you do that over time. You can also do it badly and wrongly, and people can use it shallowly. But there will be entrepreneurs who figure out a extraordinarily
good way to do it. And out of it, there will be great new things to come. Google creates a lot of incentives for development on the web through search, through Chrome, through everything that you do. Yeah. How do you make sure those incentives are aligned toward those goals? Because I think maybe the biggest thing here is that the web ecosystem is in a moment of change. And Google has a lot of trust to build and rebuild. How do you think about making sure those
incentives point into records? Look, not everything is in Google's control. I wish I could influence how what is the single toughest experience when I go to websites today. As a user, you have a lot of cookie dialogues to accept, etc. Right? So I would argue that there are many things outside. You can
go pull 100 users, right? And like, you know, so, but you know, the incentives we would like to create, there's a complex question, which is how do you reward originality, creativity, independent voice at whatever scale that you're able to do and give a chance for that to thrive in this content ecosystem we create, right? And that's what I think about. That's what the search team thinks about. Yeah. But I think it's an important principle and I think it'll be
important for the web and important for us as a company. That's great. Well, Sundar, thank you so much for the time. Thank you for being undercoder. Thanks. Thanks, Nalak. Greatly enjoyed it. I'd like to thank Sundar for taking the time to join decoder today and thank you for listening. I really hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us in line. You can email us at decodertheverg.com. We read all the
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Today's episode is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It was recorded by Viren Pavec and Brett Putman and was edited by Kelly Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The decoder music is my break master cylinder. We'll see you next time.