Transcript of Sundar Pichai on Future of AI, Antitrust, and Privacy

You’ve had these chatbots scale up to hundreds of millions of users. We’ve grown inquiries. So I think it feels very far from a zero sum game to me to use other areas in parallel. Like TikTok came in, everybody started using TikTok. 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.

AI Investments and Revenue

EMILY CHANG: 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 AI?

SUNDAR PICHAI: Well, I mean, in 2025 our CapEx is $75 billion. Right. 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 way more. 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.

EMILY CHANG: 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?

SUNDAR PICHAI: There is, look, I mean our entire, mean the, the growth in cloud like Vertex AI is up 40x in usage on a token basis just in the last 12 months. So obviously, you know, we have billions of dollars in providing AI based solutions in AI as an infrastructure. AI subscriptions. So there are many, many new businesses.

AI Content and the Web

EMILY CHANG: YouTube and 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.

SUNDAR PICHAI: I mean look, anytime 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’re using AI to help improve how we direct content, etc. You know there are good content being created using AI as well. So we’re just trying to elevate high quality content.

EMILY CHANG: There is a lot of anxiety out there about the health of the open web. You know, AI as you just, it relies on the good stuff, like it relies on high quality content. As you push further into AI generated content, does that undermine the entire system? Like does the web become just a watered down version of itself?

SUNDAR PICHAI: Look, it’s another area, you know, people have had questions about the web now for the past 10, 20 years, right? I said this during I/O but if you look at the index, we index the web, the number of web pages that we are indexing is up 45% just in the last two years alone.

EMILY CHANG: What about the last two months?

SUNDAR PICHAI: The there’s just definitely people are creating a lot more content. I do think creation is getting easier, not just in web across. If you look at YouTube, et cetera, the amount of content is exploding. And so I do think as content creator you have to think about many, many modalities, platforms, et cetera. But the opportunity space gets bigger.

AI Overviews and Publishers

EMILY CHANG: You’ve said AI overviews are good for publishers. The publishers we talk 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 AI overview, you’re answering the question for me right there on Google. Publishers say they can’t opt out or they might be de indexed from Google entirely. So what is the concrete evidence that this is actually good for them and not just good for Google?

SUNDAR PICHAI: A few things. I mean I, I think compared to most companies in the world, we take character design experiences which is going to showcase links. We took a long time testing AI overviews and prioritized approaches which result in high quality traffic out. I’m confident that many years from now that’s how Google will work. We think the value proposition in Google is people come. Yes, sometimes they may 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 AI overviews the quality improves, the context we are giving users improve. What we are seeing is people are clicking and going to a more diverse set of websites and they are spending more time on average per click.

AR and Wearable Technology

EMILY CHANG: You announced new spectacles at I/O. 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.

SUNDAR PICHAI: Look, ultimately, you know, you could have asked questions like this about driverless cars, right? Ultimately it’s the people who choose what they want to do, right? And so you will only succeed in these things if you’re building something delightful. I am wearing glasses right now, right? So for me, they don’t have a.

EMILY CHANG: Camera in them, do they?

SUNDAR PICHAI: They don’t. 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 want it to, it’s going to give me important information, make it more useful. My life gets better. Look, I’ve been playing around with AR glasses. In fact, I was talking with a friend who had it on and shot a basketball and he had an air ball and it told him that was a bad air ball, right? So look.

EMILY CHANG: And he still wants to wear them.

SUNDAR PICHAI: He found the experience delightful. His natural instinct was like, what should I be doing better? And so you’re going to have these things, be a companion, be a coach, all of it. So I think we have to do it tastefully, but if done correctly, I think people will respond positively.

Competition in the AI Space

EMILY CHANG: The Johnny Ives Sam Altman alliance it seemed Perfectly. Time to crash your IO party. Did that rain on your parade?

SUNDAR PICHAI: A little.

EMILY CHANG: And are you at all worried?

SUNDAR PICHAI: Look, I mean, I expect in this moment to be. There’ll be a lot of innovation, right? Enormous respect for what Johnny has done and I’m looking forward to seeing what new computing devices are on the horizon.

AI’s Impact on Jobs and the Workforce

EMILY CHANG: Mark Zuckerberg has said that almost all of Llama’s code will be AI 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 of Google’s code is AI generated. You have over 180,000 employees right now. Is it half that in the future?

SUNDAR PICHAI: Look, I expect we will grow from our current engineering base even into next year because it allows us to do more. 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’ll create new products and hence we will need more people, at least in the near term. To me it looks like 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.

EMILY CHANG: What about the long term?

SUNDAR PICHAI: Look, I mean horizontally as a technology, it’s tough to predict all effects of it long term. Just the fact that today 60% of the jobs today didn’t exist in 1940, at least by MIT study by an economist called David Autor. Right. So it is so tough to sit at any given time. I was just looking at YouTube in India. There are 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.

EMILY CHANG: So this isn’t too far ahead. So I hope you’ll humor me, but anthropic CEO says AI could eliminate 50% of white collar jobs in the next five years. Unemployment rising to 10 to 20%. Do you agree?

SUNDAR PICHAI: Look, I think we should take those concerns super seriously, right? With this technology, to my earlier point about new jobs getting created, you’re going to create new opportunities. I look at something like VO3 with video. It’s clear to me you’re going to allow pretty much everyone in the world to be a sophisticated creator. I can’t 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 vaccine 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 displacement. Those are serious concerns. So as a society, you 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 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. But I do, I respect that. You know, I think it’s important to voice those concerns and debate them. I think those are important conversations to have.

Antitrust Concerns

EMILY CHANG: 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 AI is built on an existing domination of search and ads and that this is just reinforcing original monopolies?

SUNDAR PICHAI: First of all, you know, we disagree with the rulings and we are, 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. You look at the success of ChatGPT or any other product. 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 we continue to innovate. I think choice is good for users. Competition is good for the world. So that’s how I see it.

EMILY CHANG: You said the remedies proposed are too extreme. Would you ever voluntarily break yourself up? Control your own destiny.

Google’s Approach to Regulation and Innovation

SUNDAR PICHAI: Look, I mean, I see. Those proposed solutions seem far overreaching compared to what the initial scope of the ruling was. We’ll see how it plays out. We spent over $50 billion in R&D last year. We are one of the top R&D investors in the world. We didn’t build things like Chrome overnight – we’ve invested a couple of decades into these products. We’ve been working on quantum computing for over a decade. This amount of R&D and innovation makes sense to do, and we take a long-term view. So that’s how I think about it.

AI and Market Competition

EMILY CHANG: I’ve heard you say a few times that you think of AI as an expansionary moment, but so far it does seem to be favoring tech giants and well-funded startups with access to GPUs and data centers and enormous amounts of capital. Isn’t this really concentrating power in fewer hands? And is AI just another winner-take-all game?

SUNDAR PICHAI: Look, 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 there’s no doubt to me that three years from now there’ll be a company which will be dominant in this AI age, which we don’t even know the name of today. That’s the only way things work in the future. Right?

Trust and Privacy Concerns

EMILY CHANG: So you have all this information about us and I mean you have our deepest, darkest secrets. It’s already hard to…

SUNDAR PICHAI: Not me, not me personally.

EMILY CHANG: 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 AI into more personalized experiences. Why should we trust you now more than ever before?

SUNDAR PICHAI: Well, I mean we earned trust by, you know, we’ve been storing people’s emails 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. So I think more than any other company, we’ve taken this responsibility seriously. People trust us in those moments and we are only evolving the products in the way people are telling us with their feedback. Look, the biggest thing people ask with Gemini and Gmail is why can’t it write more like me? It’s an ask which we are responding to.

AI and Children

EMILY CHANG: 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 going to be chatbots?

SUNDAR PICHAI: Look, there’s always going to be a sense of discomfort with new technology. I don’t know, like when online dating first came, people would ask questions like are you really going to meet someone online? So people adapt to these things. Will people comfortably naturally interact with AI in their lives in the future? Yes, like I, we are seeing it empirically in terms of how people are using them. I see people coming to Gemini asking questions. At an aggregate, we see questions like, how should I prepare for this interview? I mean, they’re talking as if it’s a companion. So we do see evidence of that.

EMILY CHANG: What about kids? Like Gemini for kids with kids.

SUNDAR PICHAI: Just like today, when we design YouTube for kids, we design it with a different set of guardrails. And so for kids, I think you would scope it down to this appropriate experience.

AI-Generated Content and Truth

EMILY CHANG: Obviously, you just unveiled VO3, which you were talking about. 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?

SUNDAR PICHAI: I think this is part of the value proposition. This is why people will come to places like Google, because they’re trying to ascertain what’s reality. I do think we are going to evolve new norms around this. For example, with VO, we are watermarking videos, they are built with Synth ID so people can detect that they were generated. With VO, you can upload any video to Google and ask about this image, and it will tell you if it was generated by VO3. We built a Synth ID detector for researchers and journalists. So all these things are going to evolve in parallel. Down the line, we will need regulations maybe to say something which is a true deep fake, just like financial fraud, you would need new norms around things like that. So we have to evolve as new technology comes along.

EMILY CHANG: I just wonder, like, are we going to have a shared sense of reality again? Like, this is made with AI. It’s insane.

SUNDAR PICHAI: I think so. I think humans, as humanity, we would value that shared sense of reality. And so you would value human experiences even more in the future. That’s how I think about it.

YouTube’s Influence

EMILY CHANG: 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 there. All kids 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?

SUNDAR PICHAI: 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 like…

EMILY CHANG: Fair enough.

SUNDAR PICHAI: So you got to choose. In this continuum, only one of that can be the truth.

Politics and Corporate Values

EMILY CHANG: Fair enough. I’m curious about your approach to the Trump administration. You were front and center at the inauguration. Google has rolled back some of its DEI policies. Did you compromise on something that you believe in?

SUNDAR PICHAI: First of all, we are one of the leading American companies, global companies, in this particular moment, with the point of inflection around AI, I do think the next few years are critical from many aspects. So we are committed to engaging. We did that with the first Trump administration. We are committed to doing that. Look around the world, we comply with laws and regulations in all the countries we operate in. Doesn’t mean we agree with every aspect of everything. But as a company, we do have our set of values and we are committed to them as well.

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 I think it’s important that as a company, we engage. There are many people in the administration, particularly around critical energy needs, critical infrastructure. These are all important areas we want to work together on.

Leadership Evolution

EMILY CHANG: When you were on the circuit last year, we spoke about the criticisms that Google and you personally have been too late to the AI game, too late to get AI to market. 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?

SUNDAR PICHAI: Look, I feel like the main thing I did as a CEO, setting up the company is to really be at the forefront of AI. When I look at the depth and breadth of what we are doing as a company, across everything we are doing on multiple fronts, I think we are incredibly well positioned. But definitely through this moment, it’s a moment in which we realize it’s a moment to accelerate at scale what we are doing. And that involves stepping back and thinking about how you can make the company work faster.

Setting up Google DeepMind, bringing our best teams into one team. Scaling up our AI infrastructure in our capex is 75 billion. That was $20 billion a few years ago. So we are dramatically scaling up our infrastructure. So you’re undertaking these big bets. Waymo people are talking about it now, but three years ago, people were very pessimistic on it. I increased our investment in Waymo at that time. So you are making decisions not based on what people are currently saying at any given moment, but with the long-term in mind.

EMILY CHANG: Are you still getting involved in nitty gritty product decisions or is that leaving that to Sergey?

SUNDAR PICHAI: You know, I’m fortunate to have Sergey deeply working on the Gemini models, but I’m very, very involved in various aspects of our product decisions. I think you have to do that in the tech space.

Future Leadership

EMILY CHANG: You’ve been CEO for 10 years now, however many years out it is. What kind of person do you think Google’s future CEO should be?

SUNDAR PICHAI: Look, I think it’s important to understand the products we build tremendously impact society. The journey of technology is doing the hard work to make sure you’re harnessing it in a way that it benefits people. And that takes a lot of work. And I think that’ll be an important quality to have.

Personal Philosophy

EMILY CHANG: You’re driving this massive technological change that’s also bound to create like, major societal disruption. How do you personally wrestle with that? Like, is there some philosopher or religion or deeper code that you turn to to help you answer some of these questions?

SUNDAR PICHAI: Okay, first of all, there are many of us doing this. I think ultimately it comes down to you don’t need much more than having empathy for your fellow people on this journey. And I think I am doing what I’m doing and so are many others in the industry, because you get a chance to positively impact people with the work you do. And that’s the true North Star.

Education in the AI Era

EMILY CHANG: What should kids be studying these days? Like, should they still be learning how to code? Should we still be getting computer science degrees? Like, I’ve got four of them. So I need some advice.

SUNDAR PICHAI: They’re probably going to be talking to AI, asking this question, so my answer doesn’t matter. Maybe. Look, I think one of the things that’s great about this moment is I think AI over time will allow us all to pursue our passions more. Right. And I think that’s the truly liberating aspect of a lot of this. You’re giving pretty much everyone a powerful tool to express themselves in the way they want to.

I won’t change anything of what you’re studying. I would still encourage people to follow their passions and find something that’s of interest to them. I think pretty much all disciplines which are valuable today, there’ll be a version of that valuable in the future.

The Future of AI

EMILY CHANG: What are the limits of AI? Like, is it possible we don’t reach AGI?

SUNDAR PICHAI: Oh, it’s entirely possible. I mean, like we could be dealing with, look, everything we can see. I feel very positive. There’s a lot of forward progress ahead with the paths we are on, not only the set of ideas we are working on today, some of the newer ideas we are experimenting with. So I’m very optimistic on seeing a lot of progress.

But you know, you’ve always had these technology curves where you may hit a temporary plateau. So are we currently on an absolute path to AGI? I don’t think anyone can say for sure. The pace of progress is staggering. And looking ahead, I sense you will have that pace of progress. But there could be limitations in the technology.

The technology currently feels like you’re seeing dramatic progress. But then there are areas where this thing can’t do this obvious thing. Like Waymo is doing very, very well. But remember, you can teach a kid to drive in about 20 hours. And so both the technology is amazing, but we are quite far from a generalized technology as well.

Personal Coding

EMILY CHANG: We talked a little bit about your vibe coding backstage. Would you like to share how often are you vibe coding and what are you working on?

SUNDAR PICHAI: I wish I could do more, but you know, I just been messing around with either with cursor or, you know, I coded with replit, trying to build a custom web page with all the sources of information I wanted in one place so I could type a location and get it all partially complete. But it’s exciting to see how casually you can do it now. Right? And compared to the early days of coding, things have come a long way. You know, it feels so delightful to be a coder in this moment in time.

EMILY CHANG: Even after that, you still need all those software engineers. Are you sure?

SUNDAR PICHAI: Okay. I think so, yes.

EMILY CHANG: Last question. We’ve got a new episode of the Circuit out this week actually about Microsoft’s 50th anniversary. Google’s 27 years old. What is Google at 50?

Google’s Future Vision

SUNDAR PICHAI: What’s Google at 50? Look, I hope we are nimble and innovating and in the technology industry you have to earn your success every year. And so for me it’s more about building a culture that’s really innovative at its core, takes a long term view and does deep technology work and translates that into products that impact billions of people.

EMILY CHANG: All right. Is a human going to be running Google or an AI?

SUNDAR PICHAI: Well, I do think whoever is running it will have an extraordinary AI companion to help.

EMILY CHANG: All right, Sundar Pichai, everyone.

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