– Good to be back. Feels like a nice tradition post I/O. – [Nilay] Yeah. – To be talking to you,
so good to be back. – I think this is the third
year we’ve done this after I/O. I’m excited. Thank you for keeping the tradition alive. Lots to talk about. You announced a lot of things
yesterday during the keynote. There’s AI mode rolling out for US users, big updates to Gemini. There’s VEO 3 and Imagine, the generators, that you’ve solved Pokemon with robots, which is very exciting. You know, my takeaway yesterday was that Google feels very confident now. There’s a real confidence
about the technology coming to life and the products, a lot of things are shipping imminently. What’s the one piece that
gave you that confidence? Is it just the volume of
things that are shipping? Is it one technology that clicked into being
ready for consumers? Where is it coming from? – Look, I think it comes
from the depth and breadth of the AI frontier we are pushing. Like in a more fundamental and foundational way. We spoke a lot about this theme called research becomes reality. But it is, you know, always felt we are a deep
computer science company and, you know, we’ve been
AI first for a while. So putting all that together and bringing it to our products at the depth and breadth is what I think it’s
really pleasing to see. For example, like, you know, people may not have noticed
it much, it was so quick. We spoke about text diffusion models in the middle of the whole thing. But, you know, but we
are pushing the frontier on all dimensions, right? And so then we spoke about world models. So I think to me that’s the exciting part. Like how deep we are pushing this frontier and then bringing it to users. And so maybe that’s what
makes it feel that way. – You mentioned research
into reality several times. Obviously a lot of these
projects have been cooking in the labs for a long time. You’ve said many times you think AI will be as profound as electricity. – Yes.
– Over the past many, many years that you and
I have talked about it. But you said something yesterday
that I think adds to that, which is that we are in a new phase of the platform shift, right? And people have talked about AI being a platform shift for quite a while. That always has meant to me that there’s a user interface
platform shift coming, right? We’re gonna interact with computers in natural
language in more natural ways and they’ll interact with
us back in that same way and everything will change. Is that the platform shift? – Yeah, there are, you
know, you are right. Each of these platform shifts, you know, changes many things on the I/O front. Nothing to do with Google I/O, just I/O in the traditional
computer science sense. You know, you could feel it. Yesterday when I watched the Android XR, I’ve used them and
played around with them. But watching it to people
talking in different languages, you can envision the future one day where it’ll actually be seamless, in a way you couldn’t
have done it with phones, you couldn’t have done it without AI. ‘Cause there’s nothing in your way. You’re looking at the other
person and talking, right? And so that is an element
of platform shift, but there are many more elements, right? This is the only platform where I think the actual platform, is over time, capable of creating and
self-improving and so on. In a way, we could have
never talked about any other platform before. So that’s why I think
it’s much more profound than the other platform shifts. It’ll allow people to create
new things in a way, you know, because at each layer of the stack, there’s gonna be profound improvements. And so I think that virtuous cycle you get in terms of how you can unleash this creative power to all of society, be it software engineers, be it creators, I think that is in gonna happen in a much more multiplicative way. And that that, you know, so
when I say it’s a next phase, I’m talking about that part too. – Lemme just put, make that
more concrete for people though. I think the last platform shift we all understand is the shift to mobile. – That’s right.
– And that was right. We’re gonna have multi-touch, we’re gonna have faster cell connections, we’re gonna increase processing power that can go with you everywhere. And then there was a
layer of applications. – That’s right. – [Nilay] That was enabled
by all of those things. – Yeah.
– You can push a button and a Toyota Camry will show up wherever you are in the world
is like a very powerful thing that required all of those ideas. Well, how would you describe
the phase we’re in now compared to that? The phase of this, because the first phase of
AI was the transformers work and the models work, and we
can all see this capability. – Yeah. – The second phase, what is it to you? – Just imagine, you know, when the internet came, blogging became a thing, you know? Pre-internet, very few people had a means by which they could put
out their thoughts out to the world, right? You know, with the
internet came a new medium. It allowed people to create and express themselves in a new way. With mobile came cameras and you could shoot and like, you know, you could create videos. You know, look at what’s
happened with YouTube. For me, the similar part
of this is, you know, we are all talking about
things like vibe coding. Yesterday you saw VEO three, right? So we are now in that phase. I think people are going to be able to create AI applications,
you can call it. But, you know, vibe coding,
there are many names to it. But that power is yet to be unleashed. You’re barely scratching
the surface, right? And these models are now, you know, they aren’t quite there. You can kind of do one shot coding, but you really need to know, be a programmer to kind of go iterate and create
something with polish, right? But that frontier is
evolving pretty rapidly. So I think you’re gonna see a new wave of things just like mobile did. Just like the internet did. You know, I came to go Google at the time when there was the AJAX revolution, the fact that the web became dynamic. You know, you had things like
Google Maps, Flickr, Gmail, all that suddenly came
into existence, right? But I think AI is gonna turbocharge in a way we haven’t seen before. – It feels like, to me,
like what you’re describing is we’re in the phase where
products are developed. – Yeah.
– Right? The capabilities were the first phase, and now we’re gonna make
some actual products – And more people can build
products than ever before. That’s the multiplicative
part I’m talking about. Not just this platform helps
you create more products. The process of creating,
developing, etcetera, is gonna be access accessible to a much wider swath of
humanity than ever before. – I’m wondering, when you look at the landscape of
products that exist now, most people experience AI in Gemini or Chat GTP as a chat bot, the general purpose interface to a bunch of knowledge
that will talk to you. What products do you see
that will have the same kind of impact as the web 2.0
products you were talking about besides the general purpose chat bot. – You know, well, obviously
you’ve seen a wave with coding IDs, right? Like, you know, that entire landscape is, I can’t even keep track of, you know, how many new companies have come into and people are using a lot of it, right? And yesterday we showed
a bunch of partners with whom we are working. So that’s an area where, because coding is where maybe AI is making the most progress. You’re seeing the application layer, at least in terms of code editors really come into vogue. We’ve had success with NotebookLM, right? We are launching products
like Flow yesterday, right? Flow is a new product which allows you to create and imagine. So those are all
applications we are doing. I think others are
beginning to do, you know, people are working on
like legal assistance and there are all kinds of startups. You know, I was recently
in a doctor’s office and they do have AI kind of look at it. I mean, transcribe the whole thing, put it all in reports and so on. That’s an enterprise application layer kind of completely works
different than when I went to visit two years ago. So all the change is
happening across the board, but I think we are just
in the early stages. So, you know, you will see it
play out over the next three to five years in a big way. – Did you ask your doctor what model their transcription
software is running now? – No, I didn’t, yeah. – One of the reasons I’m asking this, and I’m pushing on this, is the amount of huge investment in the capability from Google and others has to pay off in some products that return on that investment. NotebookLM is great. I don’t think it’s gonna fully return on Google’s data center investment, let alone the investment
in pure AI research. Do you see a product that can return on that
investment at scale? – Look, do you think in 2004,
if you had looked at Gmail, which was a 20% project, which people are internally using, internally as an email service, you know, how would we be able to think about, you know,
Gmail is what led us to do workspace, get into the enterprise. I made a big bet on Google
Cloud, you know, which is, you know, tens of billions of dollars in revenue today, right? And so my point is, you know, things build out over time, right? Think about the journey we
have been with Waymo, right? And so I think one of the mistakes people
make often in a period of rapid innovation is think about what is that next big business versus looking at the
underlying innovation and say, can you build something and put out something which
people love and use, right? And out of which you,
you do the next thing and, you know, create value out of it. So when I look at it, AI
is such a horizontal piece of technology across our entire business. It’s why, you know, I mean, it impacts not just Google
search, YouTube, Cloud, all of Android XR, etcetera, Google Play, things like Waymo, Isomorphic,
which is based on AlphaFold. So I’ve never seen one piece
of technology which can impact and help us create so
many businesses, right? And, you know, AI is gonna
be so useful as an assistant. I think that people will
be willing to pay for it. We are introducing subscription plans. So there’s a lot of, you
know, headroom ahead, I think. And obviously that’s why we are investing, because we see that opportunity. Some of it will take time and it may not be always
immediately obvious. You know, I gave the Waymo example. In fact, three years ago people were, the sentiment on Waymo was
quite negative three years ago. You know, but I actually,
you know, as a company, we increased our investment into way more at that time, right? Because you’re betting on
the underlying technology and you’re seeing the
progress of where it’s going. But these are good questions, right? In some ways, if you don’t
realize the opportunities, that may constrain the pace of, you know, investment in this area. But I’m optimistic we’ll be able to unlock new opportunities. – One reason I wanted to
start here as the foundation of the conversation is you
showed off Android XR yesterday, you showed off some prototype glasses, you have some partners making glasses. A lot of people think
augmented reality glasses powered by AI will be the realization of the full platform shift, right? You’ll have an always on assistant that can look at the world around you. You showed some of those demos yesterday. The form factor will change,
the interface will change. This will be a market as
big as smartphones were. How close do you think we are to that as a mainstream product? – You know, it was a nice
reflective moment all the way back from Google Glass. You know, wearing the product, I think there’s a difference
between goggles and glasses. You know, everyone at Virgin
understands this well. But for, you know, obviously
we are also shipping goggles. You know, we have announced
products with Samsung to come later this year. On the XR side, I think I’m
excited about our partnership with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker. We’ll have products in the
hands of developers this year, and I think, but I think those
products will be pretty close to what people will eventually
see as final products. So I’m excited. I think the pace is
actually pretty palpable. So I’d be shocked if you and I were sitting next year,
you know, I wasn’t wearing one of that when I’m doing the. – Do you think that that will
be like a mainstream iPhone level replacement product? Because there’s a lot
of hardware that needs to get developed along
the way to pull that off. – You know, there are, you’re wearing something on your face. People like I have prescription, right? And you know, the bar is
higher I think in terms of making the experience seamless
enough that you’re willing to wear it in your face
and enjoy it for all. So I don’t think necessarily
next year it’s as mainstream as what you’re talking about. But would millions of people be trying it? I think so, yeah. – Yeah.
– So both are true, I think. So I have to ask you,
just before we sat down, OpenAI announced that Jony Ive’s AI was selling a company he had started called IO to the company. And Ive and his design consultancy LoveFrom would take overall design. They didn’t announce a product, but they said it’s the future of computing and it’s coming next year. Do you anticipate more of that competition that your competitors who
don’t have a smartphone operating system will go even
harder in this direction? – I’m looking forward to a
open I/O announcement ahead of Google I/O the night before. First of all, look,
stepping back, I mean, Jony, I was, you know, one of a kind, you know. You look at this track record over the years have definitely, I’ve met him only once or twice, but, you know, admired his work, obviously like so many of us. So I think it’s exciting. Shows, you know, this is why
I feel like it’s such, there’s so much innovation ahead and I think people tend to underestimate this moment. In some ways, people tend to, I always like to point out
when the internet happened, Google didn’t even exist, right? I think what people, so when you think about, I think AI is gonna be
bigger than the internet, there are gonna be companies,
products, categories created, which we aren’t aware of today. So I think the future looks exciting. I think there’s a lot of
opportunity to innovate around, innovate around hardware, form factors, at this moment with this platform shift. So I’m looking forward
to seeing what they do. You know, we are gonna
be doing a lot as well. And I think, you know, it’s a exciting time to be a consumer. It’s an exciting time to be a developer. So I think looking forward to it. – Ive, in that video, described the phone and the laptop as legacy platforms, which is very interesting
considering his own history. Are you all the way there that the phone and laptop are legacy platforms? – Look, I think these things, if anything, I found
through this AI moment using the web a lot more, right? Because I’m like, it’s easier to create a VEO 3 video on my browser in a big screen, right? And so, I think the way I’ve internalized this is, computing will be available and like, you don’t have to make these hard choices. You know, you will, computing will become so essential to you. You’re going to have it in multiple ways around you when you need it, right? Like, I use a phone, a tablet, a laptop, and I have my workstation, right? And so I have the breadth of it and, but, you know, over time
it makes sense to me at some point in the
future consuming content by pulling out this black glass display rectangle in front of you and looking at it is not the
most interior way to do it. But I, you know, but I think
it’s gonna take some time. – I feel like we could do a full hour just on Android tablets
and where they could go. We’re gonna come back for that. – Yeah. – A big part of what you’re
describing implicate search in really big ways, right? We’re gonna be surrounded
by information search or Gemini or some future Google product. We’ll organize that information, take action for you across
the web in some way. And you will have a companion and maybe you only pull out your tablet to watch a video or something. A lot of what’s going on with search has downstream
effects on the web, downstream effects on
information providers broadly. Are you starting, last year we spent a lot of time talking about those effects. Are are you seeing that play out the way that you thought it would? – Okay. You know, it depends. I think, I do think people are consuming a lot more information and, you know,
web is one specific format, so we should talk about the web. But zooming back out, you know, there are new platforms
like YouTube and others too. So I think people are just consuming a lot more information, right? So it feels like an expansionary moment. I think there are more creators, people are putting out
more content, you know, and so people are
generally doing a lot more. Maybe people have a little
extra time in their hands. And so it’s a combination of all that. On the web, look things
which have been interesting and, you know, we’ve had these
conversations for a while. You know, obviously in 2015 there was this famous, the web is dead. You know, I always have it
somewhere around, you know, which I look at it once in a while. Predictions, it’s existed for a while. I think the web is
evolving pretty profoundly. I think that is true. When we crawl, when we look at the number
of web pages available to us, that number has gone up by 45%
in the last two years alone. Right? So that’s a staggering thing to think of. – Can you detect if
though, if that number, if that volume increase
is because more pages are generated by AI or not? This is the thing I may be
aware of the most, right? – It’s a good question. We generally have many
techniques in search to try and understand the quality of a page, including whether it was
machine generated, etcetera. That doesn’t explain the trend we are seeing, right? So generally there are
more webpages, right? So, you know, at an underlying level, so I think that’s an
interesting phenomenon. I think everybody as a
creator like you do at Verge, I think today, if you’re
doing stuff, you have to do it in a cross-platform, cross
format way. you know. I look at the quality of video content you put out, it’s very sophisticated, right? You know, and very different
from how words used to be maybe five to 10 years ago, right? It’s profoundly changed. So I think things are becoming
more dynamic cross format. I think the thing, another thing people are underestimating with AI is AI will make it zero friction to move from one format to another, right? Because our models are
natively multimodal. We kind of tease people’s imagination with audio overviews in
notebook element, right? The fact you can throw a
bunch of documents at it and you have a podcast and
you can join, learn from it. So I think this notion,
this static moment of like, you produce content by format, whereas I think machines
can help translate it from, it’s almost like different languages. – Yeah. – And they can go seamlessly between, I think is one of the
incredible opportunities to be unlocked, right, ahead. And so, but maybe I didn’t wanna
drift from the question we were having, but look, I think. I think people are
producing a lot of content and I see consumers
consuming a lot of content and you know, we see it in our products, others are seeing it too. So that’s how I would probably answer at the highest level. – The way I see it currently is that the web is at an all time high as an application platform, right? The fact that Figma exists and is as successful as it
is in its primary interfaces as a web app is I think remarkable. A lot of the products you are talking about are expressed as web apps. Even some of the most interesting
search results you showed yesterday are, you know, Google would generate a
custom web app for you and display it in a search result to do some data visualization. I think that’s all looking incredible. I think the web as a transaction platform is reaching new highs,
especially with rulings that mean smartphone makers have to let people push
transactions to the web. There’s something very
interesting happening there. As a media platform, it feels like it’s at
an all time low, right? If I was starting The Verge. – The web as a media platform. – The web is a media platform. As an information platform. If I was starting The Verge today with 11 of my co-founders and friends, we would start a TikTok channel. We might start a YouTube channel. We would definitely not start a website with the dependencies we
have as a website today. And that’s the dynamic that it feels like AI is
pushing on even harder. – I’m not fully sure I agree, right? I think, you know, I
think if you were to go and restart Verge again, I bet you would start a, you would’ve a extraordinary web presence. – At best. No, I’ve thought about this a lot. I think at best our web
presence would look like a substack or a ghost or something, right? – Maybe. Look, I, you know, I’m not, you know, I’m not fully sold on
that, like, you know, but you know the space. I acknowledge you know that
space better than I do. So I don’t mean to be, you know, I don’t have that intuition,
which you do here. But look, I see, in fact you say the web
application platform is an all time high, but
I’ve looked, you know? I was vibe coding with
Replit a few weeks ago. You know, create. I mean, the power of the future you’re gonna be able to create on the web, we haven’t given that power
to developers in 25 years. So that is gonna come ahead. So, you know, it’s not
exactly clear to me, you know, maybe today you’re looking at it and say, I wouldn’t put
all the investment in, because it looks like a lot
of investment to do that, but that may not be true
two years out, right? Like, you know, if you feel like you would create a TikTok channel, then, you know, maybe
with like 2% extra effort, if you could have a robust web
presence, why wouldn’t you? Right? And so I’m not fully, you know, I’m not fully sold on it, but I think it’s a good question to ask. But you know, you have
to somehow reconcile that with the fact that overall web
traffic seems to be growing. We see more web pages in our, so somewhere we have to
explain all of that too. – You know, the publishers,
as they often do, responded to Google I/O announcements. So the News Media Alliance after AI mode was announced yesterday, I would say they’re very upset. Here’s a statement from the president of the News Media Alliance. Links were the last
redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue. Now, Google takes content by force and uses it with no
return, no economic return. That’s the definition of theft. And they go on to say the DOJ. Lawsuits must address it. That’s pretty furious. That’s not a negotiation, right? That’s we just want this to stop. How do you respond to that very
loud set of people who say, yeah, okay, maybe it’s growing somewhere, but for us it’s crushing our businesses. – Look, I, you know, first of
all, through all the products, I mean, AI mode is gonna have sources and you know, we are very
committed as a direction, as a product direction to make sure, I think part of why people come to Google is to experience that breadth of the web and go in the direction
they want to, right? So I view us as giving more context. Yes, there are certain
questions which may get answers, but overall, that’s the
pattern we see today, right? And if anything, over the last year, it’s clear to us the breadth of where we are sending
people to is increasing. And so I expect that to be true with AI mode as well, right? – But if it was increasing, wouldn’t they be less angry with you? – Look, more than, you’re always going to have areas where people are robustly debating value exchanges, etcetera, right? Like app developers and platforms. That’s not on the web, etcetera, right? It’s inherently, you know, there’s always going to be, when you’re running a
platform, these debates. I would challenge, I think
more than any other company, we think about, we prioritize sending traffic to the web. No one sends traffic to
the web in the way we do. I look at other companies,
newer emerging companies, they openly talk about it as something they’re
not going to do, right? We are the only ones which
make it a high priority, agonize and so on. Look, we’ll engage, and you
know, we’ve always engaged. There are going to be
debates through it all. But we are committed to, you
know, I’ve said this before, everything we do across all, you will see us five years from now sending a lot of traffic out to the web. I think that’s the product
direction we are committed to. I think it’s what users
look for when they come to Google, right? And the nature of it will evolve. But, you know, I, you
know, I’m confident that that’s the direction
we’ll continue taking. – Is there public data that
shows that AI overviews and AI mode actually send more
traffic out than the previous search engine results page? – Look, the way we look at it is, I mean, obviously we take a lot of, we are definitely sending
traffic to a wider range of sources, publishers, because, just like we’ve
done over 25 years, we’ve been through the same
with featured snippets, the quality of, you know, it’s higher quality referral
traffic too, so, right? And we can observe it because the time and people spend as one metric and that are other ways by
which we measure quality of our outbound traffic
is also increasing. So, and overall, through this transition, I think generally AI
always are also growing and, you know, the growth
compounds over time. So whenever we have worked
through these transitions, it ends up posted. That’s how Google has worked.
– [[Nilay] Yeah. – For 25 years. And, you know, and we end up
sending more traffic over time. So that’s how I would
expect all this to play out. – So why do you think that there is so much general economic turmoil on that side of the house, right? If you’re sending more traffic and the goal over time is to
make sure that that works out, we’re year into it, right? And it doesn’t seem to have
gotten better over there. – No, look, we are sending traffic to a broader source of people. People may be, you know,
surfacing more content, looking at more content, so somebody individually may see less. I mean, there are all kinds
of, at the end of the day, we are reflecting what users want, right? You know, if you do the wrong thing, users won’t use our product,
go somewhere else, right? And so you have, you know, you have all these dynamics underway and I think we have genuinely, you know, we took a long time designing I/O views and we are constantly trading in a way that it prioritizes, you know, sources and sending traffic to the web. – I mean, my criticism of this industry, just be clear, is that
everyone’s addicted to Google and it would be better if they weren’t, but they’re addicted to Google, right? And they’re feeling it. And then on top of that, you see, you’ve mentioned several times, like overall queries are
increasing on Google surfaces, but they’re changing, right? They’re getting longer, they’re
getting more complicated. AI mode might walk you
through several steps. Maybe some people are
searching on TikTok now. At EQ, on the stand in the
trial the other day said, search in Safari for the last month dropped for the first time in 22 years. That’s a big stat. Obviously your stock
price was affected by it. And there was a statement. Is that trend bearing out that the standard Google
search is dropping from devices and different kinds of
searches are increasing? – No, look, we’ve been very clear. We are seeing overall
query growth in search. You know, it looks. – But have you actually
seen the drop in Safari? – Look, we have a comprehensive view of how we look at data across the board. There’s a lot of, there can be a lot of
noise in search data, but everything we see tells
us we are seeing query growth including across Apple’s
devices and platforms. And specifically, you know, I think we quantified the
query growth from AIO views and what’s healthy is
that the query growth is continuing to grow over time. So this is what I’ve said before. It feels very far from
a zero sum game to me. I said this last year. It’s interesting we spoke
about TikTok, right? Think about like how profound
a new product TikTok was. How has YouTube done since
TikTok has come, right? You could ask all these questions there. Like why is it that TikTok
comes and YouTube has grown? I think what we always
underestimate in these moments is people are engaging
more, doing more with it. We are improving our products and so, you know, so that’s how I would
think about these moments. – Well, lemme just broaden
that out to agents, right? I watched Demis Hassabis yesterday. He was on stage with Sergey Brin and Alex Kantrowitz asked him, what does a web look like in 10 years? And Demis said, I don’t know that an agent first
web looks anything like the web that we have today. I don’t know that we
have to render webpages for agents the way that
we have to see them. That kind of implies
that the web will turn into a series of databases
for various agents to go and ask questions to and then return those answers. And I have been thinking
about this in the context of services like Uber
and DoorDash and Airbnb. Why would they want to participate in that and be abstracted away for agents to use the services they’ve spent a lot of time and money building. – Two things though. First there’s a lot on
facts, a fascinating topic. The web is a series of
databases, etcetera. We build a UI on top of it
for all of us to consume. – This is exactly what I wanted, is the web series of databases. – It is, and like, you know, but I think, I listened to the Sergey
conversation yesterday, I enjoyed it. I think he’s saying for a agent
first web, like, you know, for a web which is
interacting with agents, you would think about how to make that process more efficient. Today you’re running a restaurant, people are coming, dining and eating, and people are ordering
takeout and delivery. Obviously for you to service that takeout, you would think about it
different than all the tables and the clothing and the
furniture and the like, you know? But both are important to you. You could be a restaurant
which decides I’m not going to participate in the takeout business. I’m only gonna focus on
the dining experience. You’re gonna have some people vice versa. I’m gonna say, I’m gonna go all in on this and run a different experience. So to your question on agents, right? I think think of agents as, you know, a new powerful format. I do think it’ll happen in
enterprises faster than consumer, because in the context of an enterprise, you have a CIO who’s able to go, and say, I really don’t know why these two things don’t talk to each other. – Yeah.
– Right? I’m not gonna buy more of this unless you interoperate with this. So I, I think partly why you
see on the enterprise side a lot more agent experiences. On the consumer side, I think what you’re saying
is a good point, right? People have to think about, and say, what is the value for me to participate in this world? And it could come in many ways. It could be because I participated in it and overall my business grows. – Yeah.
– Right? Some people may fa feel that it’s disintermediating
and like it doesn’t make sense. I think all of that are, you
know, all of that can happen. But users may work with their feet, right? Like, you know, you may find like some people are supporting
the agent experience and your life is better because of it. And so you’re gonna
have all these dynamics and like, you know, and
I think they’re gonna try and find an equilibrium somewhere. That’s how, you know.
– [Nilay] Yeah. – Everything evolves, yeah. – I mean, I, I think the idea that the web is a series of databases and we changed the inter, first of all, this is like the most Decoder conversation that we’ve ever had. I’m very happy with it. But, you know, I had Dara
from Uber on the show. I asked him this question
from his perspective, and his answer tracks yours broadly. He said, first we’ll
do it ’cause it’s cool and we’ll see if there’s value there. And if there is, you know,
he’s gonna charge a big fee for the agent to come and use Uber. Because losing the customer for him, losing the ability to upsell
or sell a subscription, none of that is great, right? That it’s the same is true for Airbnb. I keep calling it the DoorDash problem. Like, DoorDash should not be a dumb pipe for sandwiches, right? They’re trying to actually run a business and they want the customer relationship. And so if the agents
are going across the web and they’re looking at
all these databases, and saying, okay, this
is where I get food from and this is where I get cars
from and this is where I book, I think the demo is booking a vacation home in Spanish, right? And I’m gonna connect you to that agent, that travel agent, is it just gonna be tolls that everyone pays to let the agents work? Because the price, I still don’t, the CIO gets to just spend
money to solve the problem. – Yeah. – He says, I want this
capability from you, I’m just gonna pay you to do it. The market, the consumer market, doesn’t have that capability, right? – Well look, all kinds of
models may emerge, right? I can literally seem, envision, 20 different ways this could work. Consumers could pay a
subscription for agents and the agents could
rev share back, right? So, you know, so that is a CIO like use
case you’re talking about. That’s possible. We can’t rule that out. I don’t think we should underestimate, people may actually see more
value participating in it. You know, I think this is, you
know, it’s tough to predict, but I do think over time, like, you know, like if you’re removing friction and improving user experience, you know, it’s tough to bet against
those in the long run. Right? And so I think it, you know, I think if in general you
are lowering friction for it, you know, and then people
are enjoying using it, right? Somebody’s going to want
to participate in it and grow their business. – Yeah. – Right, and like, would
brands want to be in retailers? Why don’t they sell directly today? – [Nilay] Yeah.
– Like why won’t they do that? ‘Cause retailers provide
value in the middle, right? And like, you know, why do merchants take credit cards, right? Like why pay? I mean, I’m just saying, so like, there are many parts, like, and you find equilibrium because merchants take credit cards because they see more business as part of taking credit cards than not, right? And which justifies the increased cost of taking credit cards. It may not be the perfect analogy, but I think there are all these kinds of effects going around. But what you’re saying
is true there, you know, some of this will slow progress in agents just because we all are
excited about A2A and MCP and we think no. Like some of it will slow progress. But I think it’ll be very dynamic, yeah. – Yeah, there’s other pressures on Google. There’s anti NHS pressures. – Yeah. – The government would
like you to sell Chrome. Can you do all the things you wanna do if you’re made to sell Chrome? – Look, I mean, I, you know,
I don’t want to comment on, look, we are, you know,
we are in a legal process. You know, I look at having
directly been involved in building Chrome, right? I look at the, I think there are very few companies, which would’ve, you know, we not only improved our product, we improved like the state of
the web by building Chrome. We open sourced it. We provided Chromium, everyone else has access to the browser. So I think the amount of R & D, the amount of innovation we put into it, the investments in
security, etcetera, we do. So I think we come. – But if you’re made to sell it, can you do all the things
that you want to do? – Look, I don’t think that’s the scenario we are looking at, but stepping back, you know, as a company, look, I think as a company,
I think of ourselves as a deeply foundational
technology company, which then translates it into products that touch billions of people. And, you know, so we do it
across many, many things. And so, of course, I
think, look, as a company, we are gonna continue investing and doing our best to innovate and build a successful
business in all scenarios. So this is how I would answer it. – The Trump administration is extremely transactional, I would say. You know, the tech industry
has a new relationship with Trump in a second term. You were at the inauguration. Have you had conversations about what a settlement might look like and what the Trump
administration might demand to make these problems go away? – No, look, we’ve always, we’ve engaged with the DOJ like we do over the years on, in the context of all the cases we have. So that’s, you know, that’s how we normally
do these conversations. – Trump has very publicly said
he doesn’t like his search ranking and he wants
it changed in some way. Would you ever adjust the
search ranking for Donald Trump? – No, like, you know, we have a, I mean, I can’t, today the
way Google search works is I cannot, no person Google can influence
the ranking algorithm. – AI mode is different, right? We’ve seen system prompts adjusted in very chaotic ways
from some of your competitors. Is that something that you
would be open to in a world where you’re serving the full answer? – So what? – Would you adjust the AI mode responses in response to political pressure? – No. – Because we’ve seen
certainly in Grok and others, the system prompts change the answers in dramatic ways. – Oh, like the way we do ranking, right? Like, you know, the way we do
ranking is sacrosanct to us. You know, we’ve done it over 25 years. You know, we make a lot of, there’s a lot of ranking signals we take into account and stuff. And if there’s broad feedback from people that something isn’t working, right? We will look at it systematically
and try and make changes. But, you know, but we
don’t look at individual cases and ever change ranking. – When you think about those
sources of information, one of the things that I have
been thinking about a lot is, I dunno, the CDC webpage has changed a lot recently, right? Diversity, equity, inclusion language has been removed from pages across the government. Those used to be very high ranking sources in Google search, right? We would just implicitly trusted the CDC’s web pages in some ways. Are you reevaluating that? That there might be misinformation
on some of these pages that then gets synthesized
into AI results? – Oh, it’s a misunderstanding
of how search works, right? We don’t individually
evaluate the authoritativeness of like a page, right? And like it’s what our
signals does in page rank. You know, obviously our signals are multiple orders of magnitude more complicated than page rank today. But to use page rank as an example, we weren’t the ones determining how authoritative a pages is, it’s how other pages were linking to it, like an academic citation, etcetera. So we don’t, you know, so we are not making
those decisions today. And so I don’t see that changing. – As you synthesize more of the answers, do you think you’re
gonna have to take more responsibility for the results? – Look, we are giving context around it, but we are still
anchoring it in, you know, the sources we find, you know, but we’ve always felt a high
bar, you know, in Google. I mean, last year when
we launched AIO views, I think, you know, people
are adversely querying to find errors and the error rate was one in 7 million for adverse real queries. And so, but that was a big, but that’s the bar we’ve
always operated as a company. And so I think to me, nothing has changed. Like, you know, Google
operates under a very high bar. That’s the bar we strive to meet , and you know, our search
page results are there for everyone to see. But that comes that
natural accountability, and you know, we have to
constantly earn people’s trust. So that’s how I would approach it. What do you think the
marker is for the next phase of the platform shift after this one? We open by talking about
we’re in a second phase. What’s the marker for the
final phase or the third phase? – Of the platform shift, you mean? – Yeah. – [Sundar] Of the AI platform. – What are you looking
for as the next marker? – Oh, you know, look, I think, you know, the real thing about AI, which I think why I’ve always
called it more profound is, you know, self-improving
technology, right? And, you know, having watched AlphaGo, you know, start from scratch,
not knowing how to play go, and, you know, within a couple hours or four hours be better than a top level human players. And in eight hours, you know,
no human can ever ask for it to play against it, right? So, you know, and that’s the essence of
the technology, obviously, in a deep way. So I think, look, I think
there’s so much ahead, you know, on the opportunity side, you know. I’m blown away by the ability
to discover new drugs, you know, completely change how we treat diseases like
cancer over time, etcetera. You know, the opportunity is there. You know, the creative
power, which I talked about, which we are putting in everyone’s hands, like the next generation of kids, everyone can program and will to, if you think of something,
you can create it. I don’t think we have
comprehended what that means, but that’s going to be true. The part which the next
phase of the shift, which is gonna be really
meaningful is when this translates into the physical world
through robotics, right? So that aha moment of robotics,
I think when it happens, that’s going to be the
next big thing we will all grapple with, right? Today they’re all online and
you’re doing things with it. But, you know, one hand, you know, today I think of Waymo as a robot, right? So we are running around,
driving around a robot, but I’m talking a more general
purpose robot, and you know, and when AI creates that
magical moment with robotics, I think that’ll be a big
platform shift as well. – Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. Next year we’re gonna do
this with glasses and robots. It’s gonna be great. – We’ll give it a shot. – Thank you so much Sundar. – All right, thanks
Nilay, I appreciate it. (upbeat music) I decided get more and more
fancy, more stuff every time. – I feel like I would say
something more important this way.