How AI changing the world explain
confident and cohesive Google. How would you describe it?
Like, are you getting better at choosing your own dance music?
Look, I. I think when you when you undertake a
set of things, you know, it takes time. But, you know, internally, we have known
all of this was in progress. We've been training Gemini, releasing
versions every few months. I think 2.5 was a real breakthrough in
terms of capabilities, and it's at the frontier of where the models are.
And so putting that in our products across
our suite of products, I think that's what makes the story come alive.
So candidly, I'm using chat bots more and I'm using Google less.
Maybe you are too. What is the fate of search in a world of
AI agents and personalized answers? Is it evolution or extinction?
Look, people have been asking this question now for a couple of years.
You've had these chat bot scale up to hundreds of millions of users.
We have grown in queries. So so I think we it feels very far from
a zero sum game to me to use other areas in parallel, like
ticked off came in, everybody started using Tik-tok.
YouTube grew and did very, very well in those moments too.
So, you know, I do think search is very, very good at what it does empirically.
People value it for what it does and they're actually showing it by using it
more. So investors are clamoring to know, but
you haven't shared the specifics. How much money are you pouring into AI
and how much money are you actually making from A.I.?
Well, I mean, in 2025, our CapEx is $75 billion, right?
So. So we are definitely investing for the
long run. But, you know, it's the same investment
which powers businesses from search to YouTube to cloud to workspace to Android
and play to Waymo. Right.
And so and to our subscriptions business, we just launched
Google AI Pro and Ultra and you know, it's definitely doing well.
I've been pleased to see the reception. So I think it's such a profound
technology. I feel the opportunity ahead is bigger
than the opportunity we had in the past. So to double click there, if I may.
What specific new revenue streams do you see increasing and what revenue streams
do you see decreasing? Here is look at
our empire. I mean, the the growth in cloud like
Vertex II is up 40 X in usage on a token basis just in the last
12 months. So, obviously, you know, we have
billions of dollars and and providing air based solutions in the air and
infrastructure subscriptions.
So there are many, many new businesses. YouTube in the Web more broadly is being
overrun with AI generated content. What effect is that having on Google
products and services? Are you finding you need to allocate
more resources to filter out the low quality content?
I mean, look, any time there are these technological inflection points, it's
always a cat and mouse game. Right.
So the new technology creates new opportunity.
More people can create content. But you also have a rise in low quality
content. I think moments like this is what we
actually it's what Google is good at. Right.
Separating, finding the needle in the haystack, making sure you surface the
higher quality content. We are using Gemini to help improve
YouTube's recommendations, so we are using A.I.
to help improve how we direct content, etc..
You know, there are good content being created using A.I.
as well, so we are just trying to elevate high quality content.
There is a lot of anxiety out there about the health of the open web.
You know, as you just it relies on the good stuff, like it relies on high
quality content. As you push further into A.I.
generated content, does that undermine the entire system?
Like does the web become just a watered down version of itself?
Look, it's another area. You know, people have had questions
about the Web now for the past ten, 20 years, right?
I said this during Niyo. But if you look at the index, we indexed
about the number of Web pages that we are indexing is up 45% just in the last
two years alone. What about the last two months?
There's just definitely people are creating a lot more content.
I do think, you know, creation is getting easier, not just in web across,
you know, if you look at YouTube, etc., the amount of content is exploding.
Right. And so I, I do think as content creator,
you have to think about many, many modalities, platforms, etc..
But the opportunity space gets bigger. You've said overviews are good for
publishers. The publishers we talked to say it's
tragic. Studies show dropping click through
rates. I'm not always I don't always click
through when I see an overview. You're answering the question for me
right there on Google. Publishers say they can't opt out or
they might be indexed from Google entirely.
So what is the concrete evidence that this is actually good for them and not
just good for Google? A few things.
I mean, I think compared to most companies in the world, we take care to
design experiences, which is going to showcase links.
Right. And it's it's we took a long time
testing AOL views and prioritized approaches which result in high quality
traffic out. Mm hmm.
I'm confident that many years from now, that's how Google will work.
Right. Like, you know, we we think the value
proposition in Google is people come. Yes.
Sometimes they will get answers. That was true when we launched featured
snippets many years ago. But people come back.
People are curious. People are expanding their use cases and
people do seek out sources on the web. And we are going to prioritize
approaches. Obviously, with the AOL views, the
quality improves the context we are giving users, improve what we are seeing
as people are clicking and going to a more diverse set of websites and they
are spending more time on average per click.
You announced new spectacles at IO. Maybe Google Glass was ahead of its
time, but I'm curious what evidence you have that we really want to put
computers on my faces now. On our faces now and give tech companies
even more of our information. Ultimately,
you know, you could have asked questions like this about driverless cars.
Mm hmm. Right.
But ultimately, it's it's the people will choose what they want to do right
then. So you will only succeed in these things
if you're building something delightful. I am wearing glasses right now.
Right. So for me, I don't have a camera in them
that they don't own and they don't have a display in them.
They don't have audio in them. But if you could make something which is
no additional cost for me, but when I wanted to, it's going to give me
important information, make it more useful.
My life gets better. Look, I've been playing around with the
AR glasses. In fact, I was talking with a friend who
had it on and shot a basketball and he had a airball and it told him, like,
that was a bad airball. Right?
So look. And he still wants to wear them.
He found the experience delightful. You know, natural instinct was like,
what should I be doing better? Right.
And so you're going to have these things be a companion, be a coach, all of it.
So I think I think I think we have to do it tastefully.
But if done correctly, I think people will respond positively.
But Johnnie, I have Sam Altman alliance. It seemed perfectly time to crash your
IO party. Did that rain on your parade?
A little. And are you at all worried?
Oh, look, I mean, I expect in this moment to be that there'll be a lot of
innovation, right? You know, enormous respect for what
Johnnie has done. And I'm looking forward to seeing what
new computing devices are on the horizon.
Mark Zuckerberg has said that almost all of Lama's code will be generated very
soon. Satya Nadella has said it's as much as
35% for Microsoft right now. You've said 25% last year, I believe you
said that fact of Google's code is generated.
You have over 180,000 employees right now.
Is it half that in the future? Look, I, I expect we will grow from our
current engineering base even into next year, right.
Because it allows us to do more. I think I think the opportunity space is
also increasing. I just view this as making engineers
dramatically more productive, getting a lot of the mundane aspects out
of what they do, allowing them to spend on higher value added tasks.
But that means it's an accelerator. People will be able to do more, which
means maybe we will create new products and hence we will need more people, at
least in the near term. To me, it looks like,
you know, we will expand engineering velocity and that doesn't mean we are
constrained in what we will do. We'll end up doing more as a company as
well. What about the long term look, I mean, I
mean, long horizontally as a technology, it's it's tough to predict all all
effects of it long term. Just the fact that today 60% of the jobs
today are didn't exist in 1940. Right.
At least by M.I.T. study by an economist called David
Alter. Right.
So it is so tough to sit at any given time.
I was just looking at YouTube in India. There are a hundred million channels in
India alone. There are 15,000 channels with 1 million
subscribers. Just imagine describing this world to
someone in India 15 years ago. It would make no sense.
So, you know, I don't want to. You know, I think it's a bit pointless
to think that far ahead. But I think we underestimate how
expansionary this moment is. So this isn't too far ahead.
So I hope you'll humor me. But Anthropic CEO says I could eliminate
50% of white collar jobs in the next five years.
Unemployment rising to 10 to 20%. Do you agree?
Look, I think we should take those concerns super seriously.
Right. But with this technology, to my earlier
point about new jobs getting created, you're going to create new
opportunities. I look at something like a video tribute
video. It's clear to me you're going to allow
pretty much everyone in the world to be a sophisticated creator.
I can sit and linearly like, you know, imagine what the impact of that will be,
right? So you're creating all these new
opportunities. You have tremendous positive
externalities. You know, we will tackle tough, vexing
problems, make progress on areas like cancer.
Right. You know all that.
Educate a lot more people as part of that.
You know, there could be job displaced. I mean, those are serious concerns.
So I as a society have to think about how do you reskill people?
What are new social safety nets that you would need?
Those are super important conversations for society to have.
But I think being too specific and saying that that many jobs, you know, I
just don't see the we have made predictions like that for the last 20
years about technology and automation. It hasn't quite played out that way.
Yeah, but I do. I respect that.
You know, I think it's important to voice those concerns and debate them.
I think that those are important conversations to have.
In two trials now, judges have said that Google is a monopoly in search and
partly a monopoly in ads. How do you address the concern that your
A.I. is built on an existing domination of
search and ads and that this is just reinforcing original monopolies?
First of all, you know, we disagree with the rulings and we are in the process of
appealing these things. Look, if anything, this moment has shown
I don't think there's anyone here who is using anything they don't want to use.
If you look at the success of Jeopardy or any of the product and people are
literally have more choice than ever before.
The reason people use Google is because they want to use it.
Right. And so I think I think we continue to
innovate. I think choice choice is good for users.
Competition is good for the world. So that's how I see it.
You've said the remedies proposed are too extreme.
Would you ever voluntarily break yourself up?
Control your own destiny. Look.
I mean, I see. I mean, those are they seem compared to
what the initial scope of the ruling was.
Some of the proposed solutions are far overreaching.
We'll see how it plays out. I look at the amount of what we we spent
over $50 billion in R&D last year. We are one of the top R&D industries in
the world. We take such a lot.
We enable things like Chrome. And I, you know, we have invested a
couple of decades into this Waymo and we've been building it over a decade.
We've been doing that with quantum computing for over a decade.
This amount of R&D, this amount of innovation, I think makes sense to do
when we take a long term view. So that's how I think about it.
I've heard you say a few times that you think of it as an expansionary moment,
but so far it does seem to be favoring tech giants and well-funded startups
with access to use and data centers and enormous amounts of capital.
Like isn't this really concentrating power in fewer hands and is just another
winner take all game? Look, I think there are you know,
while I'm confident there is a company that's going to be created with AI, just
like when the Internet happened many years after the Internet happened,
Google didn't exist. So, you know, there's no doubt to me
that three years from now there will be a company which will be dominant in this
age, which we don't even know the name of today.
That's the only way things work in the future.
Right. So.
You have all this information about us and I mean, you have our deepest,
darkest secrets. It's.
It's already hard to not. Excuse me.
Well, yeah, actually, you do not. You personally, but your company does.
It's already hard to trust big tech. And now you're going to be using more of
this information to integrate into more personalized experiences.
Why should we trust you now more than ever before?
Well, I mean, we earn that trust by you know, we've been storing people's
e-mails now for many, many years, but we've handled that content responsibly.
I hope we protect it from bad actors.
We fight against unwarranted requests, or I think more than any other company,
I think we we've taken you know, this is a responsibility.
People trust us in those moments. And we are only evolving the products in
the way people are telling us, you know, with their feedback.
Look at that. You know, the biggest thing people ask
with Gemini and Gmail is why can't it write more like me?
Hmm. It's a it's an ask, which we are
responding to. Google's rolling out Gemini to kids.
I mean, I've got enough on my plate parenting with more screen time and
social media. Are our kids best friends are going to
be chat bots. Look, I there's always going to be a
sense of discomfort with new technology. I don't know, like when online dating
first came, people who ask questions like, are you really going to meet
someone online? And so people adapt to these things.
Will people comfortably, naturally interact with the air in their lives in
the future? Yes.
Think we are seeing it empirically in terms of how people are using them.
Like I see people coming to Gemini asking questions like at an aggregate,
we see questions like, like, how should I prepare for this interview?
I mean, they're talking as as if it's a companion.
So we do see evidence of that. But what about kids like Gemini?
For kids with kids just like, you know, today when we designed YouTube for kids,
we we design it with a different set of guardrails.
And so for kids, I think, you know, you would scope it down to the appropriate
experience. Obviously, you just unveiled V3 which
which talking I mean, it is mind blowing seeing these super, super lifelike
videos, but it is also really scary. Is this the end of truth as we know it?
I think this is part of the role. When you ask I think that's part of the
value proposition. This is why people will come to places
like Google because they're trying to assert and what's reality, right.
And what's not. And and I do think it's while we are
going to have all new norms around, for example, with video, we are watermarking
videos, they are built with it so people can detect that they were generated with
video. You can upload any video to Google and
ask about this. Any image to Google, ask about this
image and it will tell you if it was generated by V or three.
We built a centrality detector for researchers and journalists.
So, you know, all these things are going to evolve in parallel down the line.
We will need regulations maybe to say something which is a true deepfake fake,
just like a financial fraud. You know, you would need new norms
around things like that. So all you know, we have to evolve as
new technology comes along. I just wonder, like, are we going to
have a shared sense of reality again? Like it's just
like, this is it. This is made with the AI.
It's insane. I think so.
Like, you know, I think humans as humanity, we would value that shared
sense of reality. And so you would, you know, you would
value human human experiences even more in the future.
Right. That's that's how I think about it.
YouTube is arguably the most influential media platform in the world now.
I mean, it is a political force. It's a cultural force.
Our kids are learning. They're all kids.
I think they want to be creators. 75% of teenagers, I believe, say they're
watching it every single day. I'm a mom.
You're a dad. Like I know you're in charge of the
thing, but does it ever terrify you to have that much power?
Okay. I mean, I.
I think that sense of power is an illusion.
I think, like when you're working in the tech industry, you know, you've
simultaneously started with the conversation with like, are you about to
go extinct? And then you're ending the conversation
with, aren't you the most powerful thing in the world?
So you got to choose, in this case, vanilla
one. Only one of that can be the truth.
Fair enough. I'm I'm curious about your approach to
the Trump administration. You are front and center at the
inauguration. Google has rolled back some of its DCI
policies. Did you compromise on something that you
believe in? Look, first of all,
you know, we are one of the leading American
companies, global companies, in this particular moment with the point of
inflection around I, I do think the next few years are critical from many
aspects. So we are committed to engaging, and we
did that with the first Trump administration.
We are committed to doing that. Look around the world.
You know, we comply with laws and regulations
in all the countries we operate in. Doesn't mean we agree with every aspect
of everything. Right?
But as a company, we do have our set of values and like so we are committed to
them as well. So I think, for example, as a company, I
think we are committed to making sure we develop AI in a way
that protects the planet. That's an important value for us.
And you've seen us prioritize efforts around renewable energy.
So we'll continue doing those things. But but look, but I think it's important
that as a company we engage. You know, there are many, many people in
the administration, particularly around critical energy needs, critical
infrastructure. These are all important areas we want to
work together on. When you were on the circuit last year,
we spoke about the criticisms that Google and you personally have been too
late to the game, too late to get A.I. to market.
And and I wonder, how has your own leadership style evolved over the last
couple of years specifically? Like, have you changed at all to meet
this moment of radical disruption? Look, I, I feel like this the main thing
I did as a CEO setting up the company is to really be at the forefront of AI.
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