Sundar Pichai says Search will change profoundly in 2025

Google CEO Sundar Pichai was interviewed at the NYT DealBook Summit.

Here are my notes on the interesting things he said:

• “We are in the earliest stages of a profound shift.”
• “I would love to do a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft’s own models and our models any day, any time. They’re using someone else’s models.” He followed this up with, “I have a lot of respect for them and the team.”
• “The models are definitely going to get better at reasoning, completing a sequence of actions more reliably - more agentic if you will.”
• “I expect a lot of progress in 2025, so I don’t fully subscribe to the wall notion.” (This is in regards to people saying AI progress will hit a wall. Sam Altman recently said there is no wall.)
• “The area where we applied AI the most aggressively if anything in the company was in Search. The gaps in Search quality were all based on Transformers. Internally we call it BERT and MUM…We were improving the language understanding in Search. That’s why we built transformers in the company.”
• “Search itself will continue to change profoundly in 2025.”
• “I think you’ll be surprised even early in ‘25 the kind of newer things search can do compared to where it is today.”
• When is Waymo everywhere? “We are in 6-7 cities already by the end of this year…we are already in the process, may I just walk through the scaling up. I think in the US by next year we’ll be in like 10 cities robustly…so I think we’re making good progress.” He admitted Tesla was also doing great work in this space.
• He has not discussed the DOJ proposed breakup of Google with Donald Trump but he is optimistic that Trump recognizes the need to innovate and build things.
• 25% of the software written at Google is written by AI. Sundar: “To put a fine print on the first part, humans are writing the code. The AI systems are suggesting completions and 25% of the code that’s checked in involves people accepting those suggestions.” Blogging made anyone a publisher. The same thing will be true of coding.
• Re Geoffrey Hinton saying he regrets his life’s work: “I think the world of Geoff…I think he definitely feels, and something a lot of us share by the way, you know I said this many years ago, I called this the most profound technology, as profound as fire or electricity and I think it’s going to affect all walks of life and I think he’s definitely of the opinion we need to think deeply about this technology as early as possible and get it right for the benefit of humanity…I’m definitely on the optimistic side.” He talked about Alpha Fold finding better drugs and tackling problems like cancer and vaccines. “Geoff is proud of the work he has done. He’s just asking questions. I think all of us should think about the implications of this technology.”
• Re Content creators: “We spend a lot of time thinking about the traffic we send to the ecosystem…it’s an important priority for us…There’s always going to be a balance between understanding what is fair use when a new technology comes vs. how do you give value back proportionate to the value of the IP, the hard work people have put in.” “Down the line, I mean we are licensing content for AI today. We are doing that where we see value.” “I think over time, will there be models by which people can create? I think there’ll be a marketplace in the future, I think. There will be creators who create for AI models or something like that and get paid for it. I definitely think that’s part of the future.”

Watch the full interview

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