¶ Intro / Opening
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¶ Google I/O Keynote Overview
Casey, I couldn't help but notice that during much of the IO keynote you were on your phone playing Bellatro and doing emails on your laptop.
Well, you know, when when you have your agent recording the entire thing and transcribing it for you, you can just, you know, sort of glance up every few seconds and see if a news event is happening. So it's actually really amazing the future we're living in. You can pay attention to nothing and be fine. Welcome to the future.
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I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Noon from Platin
Yeah. It's our annual field. We have all the big news plus our conversation with Google CEO Super. And then some other highlights With our system update. You know I told that to install last night, but it didn't.
Do you delay it? Yeah. You're always doing that.
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Well, Kevin, the keynote just wrapped up here at IO twenty twenty six. What did you think?
Yes, this is like the coachella of capitalism, the uh warp tour of the web, the lollapalooza of
Link
I can keep going. Please don't. And um they are doing a lot. Uh we heard about everything from like agentic search to these new like video editing models and products that they have. All the way to Dennis Abis at the end of the keynote declaring that we are in the foothills of the singularity.
When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity.
I love that like Google's version of the Steve Jobs like one more thing is like A great way to end. So yeah, what was your standout? Uh what what did they announce that caught your eye?
¶ New Search & Gemini Strategy
I mean they have said that they just made the biggest change to search in 25 years. I think time will tell if that is truly as significant a change as they're suggesting because when we saw it in the demos, it just looked like The box grows if you type more into it. But you know, they're also saying that by the summer they're going to be generating custom user interfaces based on your query and a bunch of other stuff.
I think like a through line through everything that they discussed here was coming this summer or coming to a group of trusted testers. And with with these kind of like productivity tools, until they're in your hands, you don't really know if anything has changed in your life or not.
There was a lot of focus on agentic stuff like agentic coding. They have this new agentic search mode which basically is sort of the fancy upgrade to Google Alerts. You can have it sort of tell you when there's like a new home listed on Zillow or a new baseball score you might care about or something like that. I was really interested that they seem to be betting very big on cost and speed. So their new model that they talked about today was Gemini 3.5 Flash.
which is the newest version, but it's also, they say, four times faster and much cheaper than the other leading frontier models. And so I think Google's strategy of kind of betting on scale and distribution and like making their models as efficient to serve as possible is really the direction they're going in. Like they they don't seem to care about having the absolute most cutting edge models as long as they can serve them cheaply and quickly to billions of people.
¶ Gemini Flash Early Reactions
I mean I think they care about it, I think that they just haven't built it yet. You know, fast and cheap is what you talk about when it isn't the best. Um and so that's what we're getting this year. But you know, I am interested in trying these new agents. I'll say I I tried to use the new agent. I I said uh let me know if Kevin Roos writes a good story, but it it hasn't Sent me anything and so I don't know if it's broken or if the AI isn't working or what.
I mu I'm writing good stories constantly, so something must be going on.
I mean my real curiosity is like which of these agents are going to find true product market fit? Like which is the agent that is going to get a billion users because We saw them show off what is effectively their version of OpenClaw, which definitely like had a big moment earlier this year.
But it's still not clear to me that that is an actual mainstream use case. Like I have to say like of everything they showed off, like I'm not like dying to like have, you know, Gemini OpenClaw working overnight on my behalf because I don't know what I would ask it to do.
Yeah, I I think that was actually my one of my favorite parts because I am currently running a Claude Swarm on my open laptop.
Doing what? What is it doing?
And what they have said is that you can now do that through Gemini Spark, this new agent thing, and it will run in like a virtual machine on the cloud, so you don't have to like keep your laptop cracked uh like an insane thing.
Kevin, please what are you doing with your clock? You can't even tell me because you're not doing anything.
I'm ushering in the singular.
Sorry.
You're generating r meat recipes, uh
I'm building a bioweapon, but I don't wanna say that in this crowd.
Um they get sensitive about that sort of thing around you.
¶ Google I/O Vibe & AI Outlook
Yeah. So what was the vibe of I.O. this year?
I mean I I honestly the only people that I have talked to are like reporters and people who work at Google. So like I feel like we have not really had a chance yet to talk to developers and see what is on their minds. Clearly they have a lot of new toys to play with um and I'm sure they're excited about that. Uh but you know, as I said, until you get your hands on them, you don't really know if your life has changed.
But I feel like they have confidence in their sort of place in the front of the pack. I don't think they believe that their models are the best in the world yet, but if they're cheaper and faster and they can do more stuff, they have this new omni model that can take in video as well as images and text. So I feel like they're they're sort of
Doing the spray and pray approach to AI development, which is you just do everything everywhere all at once and hope that something hits. And it's worked for them.
Yeah. And I guess I will say one thing about the vibe here at IO this morning, Kevin, which is this is the only recent gathering of a large number of people where mentions of AI did not produce a large chorus of booze. Um this this was a crowd where people actually seemed like they wanted to hear about new AI developments and as we saw many, many AI generated images and videos over almost two hours, there was Neri Aboo to be heard.
I agree, not a lot of mention of the AI backlash or any of the things. I think they're just sort of hoping that these new products are so useful to people that they'll sort of forget about all their objections. And then, you know, of course comes Demisavos to talk about the singularity, just to remind you that none of this is normal, that we are experiencing something very weird.
All right, well I think those are some good early thoughts. We have a lot more to do at I.O. uh. starting with probably uh hitting that uh lunch line in the press tent.
I saw some Ube croissants on my way in. I'm still trying to figure out what that means, but uh I'm gonna go try it out.
Perfect.
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¶ Gemini Flash Hands-On Review
All right, Kevin. Well we are back in the studio the day after I owe and we have a few hours before we head back down to interview Sundar Pachai. But before we do that, you have spent a little bit of time playing around with this new Gemini 3.5 flash model. So, what have you been doing with it?
So I did try to use anti-gravity, their kind of coding assistant, to put the model through some of my own evaluations. And it seems like two things are true. One is it's very fast. It's very fast and you don't hit your sort of token limits uh at all, like very quickly, uh, which is a nice contrast to some of the other coding models that I've used.
And the second thing is that it just doesn't seem like that much of an improvement over what is out there now. I think th you know, there have been some people on my feeds talking about how they are feeling disappointed by the new Gemini model. There's some indications that it's maybe not as good as Uh, Gemini 3.1 Pro at some coding evaluations, but it is much faster. And I think the other thing that people are reacting to is the cost.
So the cost of Gemini 3.5 Flash, while lower than other kind of frontier models, is significantly more expensive than the last version of Gemini Flash. So people are upset about that. But I think in general, my sense is like it's a good model. It's a pretty good model. It's not like blowing me away, but it is quite fast. And if you are a company that's burning, you know, billions of tokens a day.
You might
Be interested in that, but for the average person, I would say like nothing about it has made me want to switch to it as my daily driver yet. Yeah.
I have to say, like this class of models has always just felt like it's not for me. Right. Like I am somebody who is always willing to wait a little bit longer and to spend a little bit more to get the best answer. Right. Like I would sort of rather do that. than just sort of have like instant answers from a very cheap model.
You like to surround yourself with kind of awe inspiring intelligence. That's why we're hosting this podcast together.
Exactly right. And so I mean look, I think for a very wide variety of use cases, a model like this is going to be perfectly fine. If you're, you know, the average Gemini user and you're just trying to pass sixth grade for free, I think this model is going to be a lot of help. But you know, the sort of more vocal AI power user crowd, which are the people that you're gonna find on social media sort of putting these models through their paces on day one, does seem to be
a little disappointed here. And I do think it's notable that a model that was sold to us yesterday largely on the strength of its low price does not actually seem to be as cheap as maybe we were told.
Yeah. And I think part of this is just that the d cycle of kind of I.O. and developer conferences is maybe out of step with how these models are actually being built. I've been hearing some whispers from
folks at Google that they are working on something that is more powerful, but that it just may not have been ready in time for I.O. this year. So I think that's one tricky thing about doing these conferences once a year is kind of Every deadline has to line up at exactly the same time or else you end up looking like you're behind.
I mean, I think the real test for Google, I mean at least the next real test for Google will come next month when it puts out three point five pro, which I think will sort of be at a similar class of the frontier models that we have today. And that's when I'm gonna sort of be putting the model through all of its paces and trying to figure out okay, like what part of my daily workflows might this kind of thing slot into. Yeah.
¶ Google I/O Overall Verdict
Casey, what is your verdict on I.O. Did it meet your expectations?
like a base hit to me. You know, I think that if they ship everything that they showed off and it works basically as advertised, like I think that there is some good stuff in there. I don't think that there was a single product that made me think if I can't use this like today, I will be in uh extreme physical distress. But yeah, overall I thought, you know, solid set of announcements. What'd you think?
Yeah, I think that basically meets my expectations. I talked to one reporter who was walking around at I.O. and who said it was like mid Sort of like you know, it's it's like good. It's good. It's a better position than they were in a couple of years a ago at I.O. when they were basically scrambling to get barred out the door.
and everything looked like it was going sideways. So they found their footing, but it is still not clear whether they are producing a model that will truly be state of the art. All right, so that is some more of our thoughts and early hands on impressions of Gemini three point five flat.
Now let's head down to Google to talk to Sundar. And because I imagine we might want to ask Sundar a question or two about AI, let's make our disclosures. I work at the New York Times, which is suing open AI, Microsoft, and Perplexity.
And my fiance works at Anthropic.
We should also disclose that we both use Google.
I'm a longtime Google user. I was I was part of the Gmail beta in two thousand and four.
Wow.
You're old.
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It's your minute in this life on this day.
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To nourish, to grow.
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The New York Times.
Find out more at nytimes.com slash your world.
¶ Sundar on Google's AI Race
🔇 Silence
Sinner Pachay, welcome back to Hard Fork. Thanks.
Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Thank you. So the last time we had you on the show was in twenty twenty three. BARD RIP had just come out. And I think at the time the perception was that Google was catching up in AI. How are you feeling about your position in the race these days?
Well that brings back memory, so it feels like eons ago, you know, those three years feel like a long time ago now. But I think it's staggering to see how much uh that both the technology is making progress. We've made progress as a company, um and I think it's a very dynamic uh moment in moment in the industry. I think our models are
at the frontier in some areas, uh, you know, and there are areas where we are behind the frontier and so it's a combination. I think if you look at, you know, overall capabilities including text, multimodality, voice or audio. reasoning in general, overall intelligence. I think we are very capable. Uh when it comes to agentic coding with tool use and instruction following, long horizon tasks. Uh I think uh w we are a bit behind uh at this moment.
But we are hard at work, uh and and the space is so dynamic. You know, all all of the leading labs have their own pre training cycles. So you have these cadences and they they may not exactly match up. I think the moment is intense enough that if you're slightly off uh you know Three months ago people are like, We are ahead and no one could catch up with us and then you know, now the conversation flips. But that's part of the territory of being at the frontier.
I think we are the only large company which is actually at that frontier, right? So one way to think about it is there are, you know, uh in this moment, uh there are a couple of startups which have made extraordinary progress. And and you know, we we are uh we've been deeply working on this for a long time. I think we took a big step forward with three point five flash.
It does address some of the areas we have been behind. Um and uh I think obviously getting it out in the real world and iterating with that data coming back uh is going to really help us. I think coding was the area where Uh getting access to the data flows was important. I think we maybe quite didn't have the surface, uh like clawed code uh as an example, or or what Anthropic maybe had with cursor too. And so
Getting anti-gravity with two point oh. We've been using it internally at Google for a while. I shared the token usage at uh Google IO. Uh I've never seen anything like it internally, right? We are doubling every week and people are really putting the models to work. And so that is helping us hill climb uh quite a bit.
But
Uh you know, the frontier is very dynamic, but I'm very, very optimistic and confident we'll we'll push through there.
It sounds like if there's like any place where you feel maybe not quite at the very lead where you actually want to be, it is coding. Is that right? Like is that where you're sort of putting the pressure?
Look, I think coding ends up being very foundational. uh in everything everything uh we do. So I think it's an important frontier to be uh on. Uh there are areas in coding where we have been very good. You know, we've been very, very good at creating single shot web front ends everything, but in terms of this long running, you know, uh task where serious developers are working on complicated code bases.
Uh I think we are making progress. It is just that there is a gap to the frontier where others are. But we are working you know, we are well aware of it and, you know, making progress.
¶ Sundar Addresses Gemini Feedback
3.5 Flash has been out for a day. I do think it typically takes a few days to really put these models to their paces. Yeah. We have seen some complaints though about pricing, model quality. Curious like what you've made of the reception so far.
Uh you know uh I'm looking forward to being done with the with my interviews and so on so that I can spend more time on uh with the teams.
Yeah, wrap it up.
Uh no. Uh look, we we you know, I'm I'm gonna meet the teams right after this. I think we are definitely um You know, it'll take a day or two to settle in. Uh I think it's a new model uh and in a new area where we've made some progress. There could be some regressions. But we will be able to quickly address them through uh through our post training, uh pretty quickly I think. There are some artifacts and behaviors we are seeing which I think are easy to address, so we will. Uh I do think given
It was a day after us putting out a lot of things. I think we had tightened usage limits to avoid the outages. But you will see us make uh progress on usage limits uh very soon. Uh that is rightfully a source of frustration when you when you encounter uh I f I feel the same, but but those are areas we will address uh pretty soon and make progress.
It seems like one thing that some of the AI companies are succeeding at is focus. Just, you know, anthropic and open AI have this sort of relentless focus on coding. OpenAI was criticized last year for sort of spreading their bets too thin, doing trying to do too many things all at once. They've now sort of tightened that. Do you feel like Google is appropriately focused on coding or are all the other bets you're making taking away resources and time and focus from the main push?
I think all of us saw some time around you know, there was an inflection point uh in coding and uh and I think we're all responding to it. Um I I I think we all have uh, you know, pretty serious strikes around this area. Uh and so I don't see it as an issue of fo we we are a large company and we have scale, so we we we will be able to focus on a m few multiple things at the same time.
I don't see it as any fundamental issues as much as we are making progress. We're gonna make progress. I think we are in the moment in time in this field where thirty to sixty days look like Five years. That's all it is.
¶ Google Search's AI Future
Yeah. Another thing that got a lot of attention uh this week was the changes that you all made to the search bar and the the sort of front door of Google, the biggest change in twenty five years. I think a lot of people expect that at some point the kind of normal Google sort of classic search interface goes away, the ten blue links maybe go away, and you just kind of have this AI mode as the default.
Uh but you haven't sort of done that yet. There's a lot of integration, but it's still you still can get the ten blue links if you want them. Do you think that goes away at any point, that you sort of rip the band aid off and just go full AI mode?
You know, I think it's important to bring users along the journey as well as making sure uh the product is working for their expectations. So, you know, I try not to get get ahead of that. I think it is very clear As we ev evolve through these changes, people are responding positively. We can see it in the long-term metrics of the product uh in such a clear way, right? And and and so
I think we understand that. Uh but, you know, people want search to be fast. They I do think through search people are looking to connect with what's out there on the web, so that's important to us. So it's it's all of that. Uh so I think you're seeing us evolve the product.
And I think you'll continue to see it be methodical, but you know, we didn't have AI mode a year ago. Uh, but now a lot of people are experiencing it. I think we have made it more seamless to go there than before. And so it's a continuum. Um, but I don't see Sources and links will always be there as part of it.
He was telling me on the ride down that he feels like he basically has not done a traditional Google search in the past year, that he's sort of fully doing these AI searches. When you hear that, are you like, cool, like this is the kind of user that I want right now? Or does it send you a little chill because, you know, the sort of traditional search ads business is pretty good one for you?
Well, uh you know, I think we will If anything in the AI mode, you know, in a in a agentic mode, I mean these things are going to do a lot more for you than what we were able to do for users. ten years ago. I think the economic value uh is always a function of uh the total value uh you're giving users. I think all of us would say over time the value we are providing users increases. There's more competition. There are more choices.
Uh so I feel comfortable between a combination of subscription and ads that the right models will continue to be there. Uh Adam Smith's rules don't change in this new world.
¶ AI's Public Perception Challenge
Okay. Let's uh talk about public perception. The New York Times, Sienna did a poll this week, found that only about sixteen percent of people say that AI is mostly good, about thirty-five percent say it's mostly bad. What do you make of the AI backlash that we're seeing right now? And how much leverage do you think Google has to change that perception?
You know, always viewed it as the most profound technology humanity will ever w work on. It's progressing at an extraordinary pace. You know, humans aren't evolved to process that much change. And there are I I think people rightfully so, uh, are anxious about, you know, what what is the future that this technology will bring.
So to me, you know, I I I understand it. I think it feels to me natural with like such a profound technology shift. We've had far simpler technology shifts where there has been anxiety around those shifts. This is of a scale unlike anything we've we've seen before. I think th we as an industry have to do a lot more to continue driving and showing the benefits that's possible with the technology. So that is something in our control.
We have more work to do to make sure when we are scaling up the infrastructure investments, et cetera. You know, what are the things we can do to to make some of that work better? But I think people's concerns are a bit more fundamental uh around the shift, uh than all of that. I think a natural part of this is people are anxious about their economic future in this world.
And, you know, you have a lot of conversation where people saying, um, you know, jobs are gonna radically change, some of it will go away, etcetera. I happen to think, you know, the outlook is better than those some of those uh dire predictions. But, you know, as a society, if you're hearing it's natural, you know, I i I would be surprised if people weren't more anxious about it. I do think it's important because the change is happening so fast, you need people to
In democracies you need citizens to be engaged, be aware that this is happening and you know, and and make their uh preferences known. That's what causes action in society. So I think there's something healthy about this dialogue too, which is happening and given the pace at which the technology is moving forward, it seems right to me, uh, both the concerns and the fact that we need to take it seriously.
¶ AI's Impact on Jobs
You're giving the commencement speech at Stanford next month. I'm sure you've noticed or heard that a bunch of commencement speakers have been booed recently by college students who are worried about AI. What are you planning to tell the graduates about AI and do you have your like boo strategy in place?
Anytime we have driven technology progress, I think it uh helps drive progress in the world and in some ways these graduates are actually both going to be a big part of that uh driving that progress and also dealing with the impact of that technology. So I think we have to be very mindful of that and
You know, I've always been an ex extraordinarily optimistic about the next generation. I think we all always have this You in the world, you know, we are anxious and we we worry about the next generation, but I think the next generation rises to the challenge and you know, builds a better world. And so I view it as no different from those moments and you know, m my goal would be to share you know, my experiences and and share that with them and that's what I'm looking to do.
You could just pretend they're saying Google. It's close enough, you know.
I'd be curious to hear a little bit more about your case that like y that you think that sure jobs may change a lot, but you know, you entry level graduate, the economic future is still bright for you. Like like what is that case in your mind?
You know, at a basic level I do think we are uh you know there is a new level of capability. All of us are going to have to be able to do things. And and you know, I I I wasn't there like when spreadsheets rolled out to people. Like, you know, I I wouldn't know how you did financial analysis before that. Like, you know, how did people do it? Right? Like
I'll say it, I didn't do it. I had no idea how to do it.
Yeah. But you know, spreadsheets change that. And so there's an aspect of this I think it just is going to change the starting point for many, many people. Just even coding. I think if you fast forward the progress we are seeing there. So many more people are going to be able to code in the world. Right. And you know, uh I've heard you two might be examples of that and like, you know, in in that journey. But I think you're just at the
leading edge of what is going to happen more and more. So I think those are the new serendipitous ways this will all work out that we underestimate. I think people are going to be uh more productive. They will have more time for leisure. All of that will simultaneously be true.
Um there are so many areas where today people's work, you know, involves a lot, you know doctors have uh, you know, high burnout rates and it's you know, it's because they train and uh uh you know and their calling is to spend time with patients, taking care of patients, but you know, most doctors would tell you if you m you actually watch their time
the percentage of time they spend with patients is uh uh less, right? So I think AI will actually help them do more of that. Right. I th I think I think those are examples of it. The radiologist analogy has been fa fascinating. It's been now uh uh a decade running. I look at
myself when I say, well, I've got on a lot more scans in my life than my dad ever did. And each of the scans have like ten x the amount of information than his scans had because they were constrained by printing film versus us being digital. And I think that number is going to be ten X in ten years. So where is that projection going into, you know, you are actually going to need AI to keep up, right, with the with that demand coming.
So I think it's nonlinear how the impact of all this will be. This is not I don't wanna be um I don't want in any way to minimize every technology shift brings disruption with it and, you know, I think i you know, there will be disruption and we as a society need to be super serious about it and engage. And so some of the conversations I think are rightful in like, you know, uh thinking through that.
But I do think there are uh many uh positive uh dimensions to it which are maybe not being talked about. And I think and and also there is uh overly deterministic dire scenarios which I quite don't agree with as part of it.
¶ AI Agents and Building Trust
Let's talk about agents. Uh, because I feel like agents actually tie sort of into this question of well, what is gonna make us more productive in the future and and how will it change our job? Later this summer you're releasing Spark, which I seems sort of intended to be an agent for uh the regular person. And I'm so curious to know, like could you walk us through something this agent is doing for you personally?
I've used it a lot more in my uh professional context, more to the context because of uh it was mainly available in my corp account, uh right, uh as part of it. In that context, uh I've definitely used it as Uh it's super easy to use it to prepare for any meeting. Uh I wish I had brought the prompt slash the output for like I just as a test case used it for hot fork.
Honestly, if you email to us, we would flash it on the screen. Yeah.
No that's what we want.
We want that. We want that. We want to know how jump I drag.
I'm not sure I'll allow that to no, I'm just kidding. Partially kidding.
So you should see Casey's browser history.
Partially kidding. But I have had it in my personal account more recently. Um so again Here's a simple task I did. I just asked it to uh just look ahead at my meetings and color code it in categories so that I can keep sense of how I'm spending my time.
I think, you know, it's extraordinary to watch it. It came back with like, you know, uh suggestions of two color coding schemes and I just had to choose one. And it's actually like sci-fi. It's just like, you know, changes the color in the calendar.
personal meetings, health-related meetings, you know, time I'm spending at work, etc. That's an example of a personal query I just did just to see what's happening, right? And um I think you have to give people a sense of I think about this as what allowed us to get someone to sit in the backseat of a self-driving car. We did it in steps. And I think there's an element of that where with agents, if if something unexpected happens, I think.
You know, people will back off from this and you know so part of it is earning their trust And so giving them a sense of control, transparency, but more importantly from a security standpoint. these systems, you know, can be hacked and so we want to make sure we are not ahead of the frontier in a in a in a wrong way.
¶ AI Regulation and Collaboration
Speaking of meetings and your calendar, we hear that you're headed to the White House uh for some kind of AI executive order signing. What should the government be doing right now to regulate AI? Do you like this idea of a kind of pre-release
uh strategy where the government gets to sort of see models before they're released and sign off on them. Is that a good idea? Is that potentially dangerous if it gives them the ability to censor or jawbone companies into releasing different kinds of models? What's what's your take on that?
Look, we'll have to wait and see the details of the full executive order, but they've been very uh uh uh they were engaged with the industry in a very robust way. Uh and I think uh the approach really balances Uh you know, innovation and o oversight. Uh we'll have to wait for the details to come out. But you know, there are a few areas which are coming up, you know, we will need more
cross industry, cross industry government coordination. So it makes sense to me. Cyber is a great example of that. I think we all have to work together. It makes full sense to me if we have found an exploit. Which could impact a governmental agency. You know, the the government needs to be prepared for it. So uh so there is validity, but of course doing it in in a in a moment with this important technology where it's important as a country to be at the frontier too.
not doing it in a way where you're overly slowing things down. And maybe that balance has to shift as we reach more advanced levels of technology. But I think I think I think to me this seems like a a a prudent approach. Uh in general I've, you know, You know, part of what we are doing with uh you know, building Synth ID, open sourcing it and then sharing it with others and more importantly, building a consortium together. I think is an example of
in a different area. These things only work together if you can come together as an industry. So so, you know, I'm I'm glad they're approaching it uh uh i in that way.
¶ AGI, RSI, and Compute Strategy
Another sort of safety related question. All of the big labs are racing toward what you call recursive self improvement. So building AI systems that improve themselves rapidly. Do you think that can be done safely? And do you feel like you have a line of sight to it right now?
You know, d these models are getting better at, you know, coding and agentic workflows and so at some point, you know, you uh you know We did you know, we did you can see in anti gravity today, you know, in in over twelve hours it can build a simple OS from scratch, right? And you know, that is Well, genuinely those are multiple thousands of hours for somebody to do, right? So you are seeing some of that in work today. We are all in our products in some version or the other have
agents and sub agents and the orchestration of those agents building uh things together. It's a continuum, right? And I think I think we are all definitely making some progress. But in the way people describe RSI, I don't think we are there yet. And you know, and I I uh that would represent a next level of acceleration and I think you know, and I think would have a lot of implications. But we aren't quite there yet.
Is there like a plan for uh oh um like I mean great news Sunday, like we just hit RSI, like is there a sort of do we do we break glass or what happens then?
I think I think if you're approaching moments like that, you would be uh you know consulting with Uh you know, i it shouldn't be an internal conversation at that point. I think it has to be a much broader conversation conversation than that. And I think we all have to avoid race conditions. Uh at at those stages of uh AGI.
Right now all the labs are racing to get more compute. There seems to be bottomless demand for compute. Uh they're hoarding it wherever they can, striking deals, uh, you know, building their own data centers. Google is still selling access to TPUs to rivals and other companies in the race. Why aren't you just keeping that for yourselves and your own models?
I I think Each is not a constraint on the other, right? So as long as we can make enough It's not a constraint. So right the right way to think about it is We have our GDM and our first-party services. If you can think about that as a company, business cash flows, you're planning for that. And then you have Google Cloud, which is a business and which has revenue cash flows, and you're doing long term plan and you're planning for that.
Right. So if we didn't have cloud and we weren't providing, we wouldn't be planning those chips anyway. Right. And so that's at the simplest level. Obviously, you know, it's a bit more complex than that. But there are a lot of advantages of providing TPUs to others. Uh the fact that researchers at Anthropic are using TPUs is what will allow us to make, in addition to us, allows us to make uh the best.
hardware in terms of next generation. And and by the way, we use NVDS uh uh chips too, and the next generation chips are incredible. And so we use that and we i we work too. When you're running platforms, I mean you have a platform side of the business and you know, I I I've always have worked on many platforms in my life and be it Chrome or Android or Google Cloud.
you know, uh why why would you ever open source something or why do you provide this technology? I mean all that makes sense on its own merits. I do think there are advantages, like I mentioned, it uh allows us to stay at the frontier. You know, economies of scale helps uh in in in various ways and so uh it makes a lot of sense that way.
¶ Sundar's AGI Perspective
Yeah. The last time we had you on, we asked you about AGI and your feelings about the term. And at the time you responded that it didn't really matter whether you've reached AGI or not, because the systems are gonna be very, very capable and Google's strategy should be the same.
Um I noticed that you did not say AGI in your keynote. Demis did, but but you did not. What's your relationship with the term AGI today and sort of the idea that all of this progress is building towards something singular and world changing?
Oh we are You know, there is inevitable progress towards AGI that's happening. I've long understood it and you know, otherwise I wouldn't have pivoted the company ten years ago to like put that technology at the heart and center of the company. Uh all I meant by that statement was Even in the scenario AGI is going to take ten years.
the technology which three years out will be so much more powerful than what we have today that I don't want people to think because AGI is ten years out, you don't need to act or prepare. That is all my statement means in those contexts.
A G I pilled.
Uh well I I absolutely you know uh I'm sure that the technology is making uh foundational progress towards AGI.
I'm less able to predict with certainty whether it's in the three to five year time frame or five to ten year time frame. The rate of progress over the last one to two years has made me feel it's on the closer side than not. And, you know, I just don't You know, in your role running one of the largest companies in the world, which has a responsibility to society, the language I choose to use around it might be different uh than than other people, but uh I think
You know, uh as a company in terms of uh you know, ten years ago at the I.O. stage, I announced TPUs and AI first data centers. Uh you know, yes, clearly understood where this technology said it.
Maybe it was a last question. And one of the more memorable phrases I think from the keynote this year did come from Demis when he said that we're in the foothills of the singularity. Can you tell us like concretely what that means from Google's perspective? And should people be excited about that or afraid or both?
Look, I've had many conversations with uh Demis obviously on this topic and uh I think I think in this context he's I think he's defining singularity as the advent of AGI. I think he's talking in that context. And you know, I think if you think regardless of if I remember, I think he had he had kind of articulated by twenty thirty or so.
I think if you believe that it makes sense to you, that's that's what you're articulating and you know, it's as simple as that. I think for him, uh that's how we define singularity and and and I think Demis, myself, many others, we all feel it's important to If that's what you believe, it's important to articulate that because we are all at the frontier building this technology.
And you know, hopefully people are listening and I think it's important to as a society we are internalizing that and and and getting ready for it.
Sonor Pashad, thanks so much for coming.
Thank you, sir.
Thanks. Great to talk to you. Appreciate it. Take care.
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¶ Elon Musk OpenAI Lawsuit
When we come back, a few more highlights from this week in our system
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Well, Casey, other than I.O. there has been a lot happening this week on some stories that we have covered in the past. So it is time for our segment that we call system update. All right, update number one is that the
Yeah.
Elon Musk OpenAI trial is finally over after weeks of testimony. We got a verdict on Monday.
What was that verdict, Kevin?
Well after less than two hours of deliberation, the jury came back and unanimously rejected Elon Musk's claims. Not on the merits, but just on the sort of grounds that he had waited too long to file the lawsuit. They said it fell outside of the three year statute of limitations. And uh they basically said we're not gonna even debate the merits'cause it's too late. You're too late, bro. Uh
When is Elon Musk gonna catch a break in this crazy world?
Yes. So I think the trial ended up being quite important, but not for reasons related to the trial. It was sort of all the evidence and all the gossipy, you know, juice that came out during the trial.
It felt like a stimulus package for the tech media. Yes. Where we just sort of had a steady drip of new lore and it kept us all very entertained. Uh I don't know that we learned very much that, you know, truly affected public sentiment one way or the other. But I definitely learned things from this trial that I'll never forget.
Yep, me too. Yeah. And uh Elon Musk is obviously saying he is not done with uh fighting open AI.
We haven't seen the last of him.
His lawyer said that he would appeal the decision and on X he said, Quote, Creating a precedent to loot charities is incredibly destructive to charitable giving in America. Charitable giving obviously something that Elon Musk famously cares a lot about. Mm-hmm.
Also one of the great revelations from this trial was that the first time we have to do that. Elon Musk himself had been scheming like prior to twenty twenty to turn open AI into a for profit company and even absorb it into Tesla. So effectively to do all of the things he would later complain that open AI actually did. Yeah.
Do you agree with Musk that this is essentially a technicality and that there's still some substantive issues that need to go to trial here?
I mean every law in some sense is a technicality, Kevin. Like that's how the legal system works. And he put this one to the test and he lost.
Yeah. Is there any lawsuits you've been waiting to file that you should get in under the statute of limitations?
My backlog of lawsuits is so big. I gotta finish this podcast and get to it. All right.
¶ Meta's AI Reorganization
Update number two, Meta is continuing to reshuffle and shrink its workforce. This Wednesday, the company officially laid off ten percent of its workers, roughly eight thousand people. We talked about these rumors on the show a couple months ago in terms of their uh relationship to AI and the fact that they were seemingly cutting workers to sort of make space for more AI in the organization.
Um we knew that these layoffs were coming, but we also got a new update to the story this week, which is that Meta announced that on top of these layoffs, it is also reassigning 7,000 workers to new initiatives related to building new AI tools and apps. Janelle Gale, Meta's head of HR, said in an internal memo that the restructuring, quote, will make us more productive and make the work more rewarding.
You know, there truly is no company among the big labs that has done as many reorgs of its AI teams that that Meta has done. I mean, like you could almost like set your watch to how often these things have been happening.
This is a company that specializes in corporate reorganizations and just happens to also make some popular social media
They monetize their social media, but the product is re-org.
Uh
But you know, look, I I have talked to some people who have actually been sort of impressed with the scale and the scope of what Meta is doing here. Like if you want to know what does it look like for a big tech company to move heaven and earth to try to catch up in an area where it is behind.
This is what that looks like. You know, so far, I don't think the efforts have borne much fruit, but look, they have just reassigned 7,000 people to work on initiatives related to AI. And of course, that's in addition to all the other, you know, hiring that they did last year. So You know, I'm far from saying that Meta is back in this race, but um of all the re-orgs they've done, I do think this is one of the most intriguing.
Yeah. And I think we should expect like a steady drip of stories from Meta over the coming months about how bad morale is. It does seem to be quite bad over there at the moment. Um that always happens when you do these kind of major shakeups and reorgs. And they're also doing all this like employee surveillance stuff that workers are understandably upset about. There was some leaked audio uh published this week from a meeting in which Zuckerberg
basically said, look, we've got to train our systems to be good at coding and and using computers. And the way that we do that is by training them on your computers and your coding because we have a bunch of really smart people here. And that was sort of his way to sort of explain away why they're surveilling their employees. Yeah.
But I have to say the the whiplash between the meta of today and the meta that we were covering ten years ago is pretty extreme. I d like the thought just keeps occurring to me, meta used to be a fun place to work.
They're not going to be able to do
a fake Main Street at their corporate headquarters where you used to be able to walk into a Mexican restaurant where everything was free and you could drink a margarita at lunch. Now that restaurant may still be there, but I think the margaritas at lunch program Is like on the decline because these people have to go create training data for large language models now. But you know, I I have to say to the employees, if you're like, man, this really sucks, like.
You know, I I mean my my heart goes out to you. Everyone should have a job that they like. On the other hand, like I think it's been clear for a long time that if you work at Meta, your job is to help Mark Zuckerberg win the race to build AGI before anyone else. And that is the entire point of the company now. Yeah. Like there's not a secondary objective. Totally.
¶ AI in Culture and Literature
All right, next update. This one is a system pope date, uh because this one has to do with our new Pope.
Did he go on a date?
No, they're not allowed to do that. Okay, okay. Uh but he is uh set to release his first encyclical on the topic of AI. This coming Monday, Pope Leo the Fourteenth uh is expected to release his document sort of circulated among the church uh that is meant to guide the clergy And the surprising part of this is that Chris Ola, one of the co-founders of Anthropic, is going to be there at the Vatican to help him launch this thing.
I didn't realize that we did uh like launch events for encyclicals. You know, it's like the like the Pope finishes up with mass and says, But I do have one more thing.
It's their IO. Yes.
This is Vatican I.O. And uh, I mean, I guess we'll be very curious what the Pope has to say. You know, Kevin, as you know, this Pope seems unusually interested in tech and has had like a relative lot to say about it during his, you know, short tenure.
Yes, and I also am very excited about this because I think this does mean that Pope Leo the Fourteenth is the most likely Pope to come on hard fork.
Absolutely.
And uh if you are in the Vatican listening to us right now, Pope Leo, please come drop your encyclical on our audience.
Your holiness, we would simply love to create content with you.
Alright, update four. The literary world has been rocked by two new scandals related to AI use by writers. The first is that an award-winning short story has been criticized by people who think that it was generated by AI.
Oh boy.
This story was a regional winner of the Commonwealth Foundation's short story prize. Uh it's called The Serpent in the Grove by Jameer Nazir of Trinidad, and it was published online by the British literary magazine Granta, but some readers thought, hey, this thing seems a lot like AI. It had uh some of the cliches of AI writing and people claim to have run this through Pangram, the AI detection tool. and found that the story uh appeared to be significantly or entirely generated by AI.
Yeah, I'm not sure that the backlash here is warranted because this story has gotten more attention uh than any previous story written in Granta. Like I think it's possible more people have read this story than like anyone has read a Granta story in years. We have.
figured out how to rescue fiction, uh, and it is just to create controversies around AI. Yeah. The Commonwealth Foundation responded to these accusations, saying in a statement that uh they quote, place our confidence in the integrity of our contributors and the caliber and experience of the judges. and chair of the judging panel and stand by the assurances given by our authors as part of our process.
And I mean look, like we we don't know.
We don't know.
Wow.
Uh this is I predict like a thing that is going to happen to every uh major literary prize is that every submission will just have to be run through an AI detector.
Also, we're all now just reading so much AI generated text that I feel like inevitably we are all just going to start writing more like it. And so even when you are writing something by hand, I think there is just a risk that over time it is going to look more like slot.
It's not a trend, it's a transformation. There's another writing scandal that came to light this week, this one in the nonfiction world. Uh this was according to my colleague Ben Mullen at the Times, uh, who wrote that a buzzy new book called The Future of Truth.
which is about truth in the age of AI, appears to have included numerous made up or misattributed quotes concocted by AI. The author, Steven Rosenbaum, acknowledged the errors on Monday. Uh he said that he took full responsibility for the errors. that he used AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude during the research, writing, and editing process, and that he was working to correct future additions.
This uh story um implicated our dear friend Kara Swisher, Kevin. I don't know if you saw this, but Kara was one of the people who had fabricated quotes attributed to her appear in this book. And it's so funny because if you read the quote that's attributed to her, it does read just like pure chat GPT. Yes. Um Do you wanna hear it? Yes.
The most sophisticated AI language model is like a mirror. It reflects our own morality back at us, polished and articulate, but ultimately empty behind the surface. It's not bound by Asimov's laws or any ethical framework, it's bound by the patterns in its training data and the objectives set by its creators. If you've ever talked to Kara Swisher.
She has been brain swapped.
A true uh pot person situation. So um yeah, this one I mean like Truly nothing could be funnier about a like a book about AI and truth just having a bunch of like hallucinated slop quotes in it. Yep. You know, you have often said that like anyone who puts a rule into, you know, like a workplace, a school, a publishing house that says, Hey, no, AI used
All you're doing is telling everyone that they have to lie about their AI. Yes. This seems like we're just kind of like hitting some kind of inflection point where it's just becoming obvious. even people who absolutely should not be doing this are still just like getting lazy and uh not doing the work.
Yeah, and I would say, like, it it's not just laziness. Like, there are a lot of things that AI tools can help you with on books. I've been using AI. not for writing my book. It's all human generated, but like in, you know, collecting endnotes and indexing and like various things that are not the main book itself.
And I have had to go through with a fine-tooth comb to make sure that all of the sources that my AI tools uh wanted to cite were actually real. And and, you know, most of them were, but like most is not enough. Especially if you were writing a book about truth in the age of AI. Yeah. And so I have had to do some cleanup on that before sending it off to the printer. So I understand uh how this thing kind of thing could happen.
But you really gotta go through if you're doing this and make sure that you are not passing off someone's words that they didn't say.
Let this be a lesson to all of the the writers uh among our listeners.
Keris Wisher will get your ass.
She will absolutely get your ass.
¶ Hard Fork Live Event Announcement
All right, before we go, we have one more update. This one is very exciting. It is about Hard Fork Live.
Hey.
That is our upcoming live event in San Francisco on June 10th, and we are finally ready to share our guests for the event. Casey, who do we have?
Well, leading off our lineup this year at Hard Fork Live, Kevin, will be Microsoft CEO Sacha Nadella.
Thank you. I'm hitting every sound effect on the board right now, there are only two.
This is somebody who we have been trying to talk to ever since we started Hard Fork. Somebody who is at the center of everything that is happening in AI and also just a really fun person to talk to. So thrilled to have Sacha as uh a marquee guest for us at Hard Fork Live. Yes.
We have a bunch more exciting guests. Figma CEO Dylan Field will be there. We've got Cindy Cones.
Executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Plus, we've got a bunch of other great guests, including Friend of the Pod and fellow tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, AI as normal technology co-author Sayash Kapoor, and AI 2027 author, Daniel Cocatello.
And you might be wondering, Kevin, will there be any fun surprises this year?
Will there be any fun surprises?
There will absolutely be some fun surprises. But you can't, they're also.
Yes.
But the good news is we will be, of course, bringing you all of those conversations here on the podcast in the weeks to come.
So fear not.
Hard Fork Live will be part of your life one way or another.
And that was our system update.
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What what year is it? Are we snapping again?
We're snapping.
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Hard fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones or edited by Virgil. Or fact checked by Kitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Katie McMurrin. Original music by Alicia Baitoupe, Marion Lozano, Rowan Nemisto, Alyssa Moxley, and Dan Powell. Video production by Viron Pavich, Jake Nickel, and Chris Schott. You can watch this episode on YouTube at youtube.com/slash hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuh. Email us as always at Hard Fork at NY Times.
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