The history and future of AI at Google, with Sundar Pichai
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Sundar Pichai just passed a decade as CEO of Google. Alphabet is now not only one of the world's biggest tech companies, but a leader in the AI race, who plans to spend a $175,000,000,000 in CapEx in 2026. Cheers.
Cheers. Thanks for coming. Well, thanks for having me. A
bit of history that people talk about a lot in the context of Google and AI is the fact that transformers were invented at Google, but then productized outside of Google with mostly ChatGPT and kind of that style of product. How do you reflect on that now?
I think it's actually worth talking about. It's a bit misunderstood. You know, transformers was done in the context of a lot of, like, TPUs, transformers were all done to solve a specific product need to some extent. Right? Like, team's thinking about how to make translation better. In the case of TPUs, how do you pay speech rec works? Yeah. Mhmm. But you suddenly have to serve it to 2,000,000,000 people. We don't have enough chips for it. Mhmm. It's like, how do you solve inference for it? So trans I
hadn't known that the transformers were specifically
It was from our research teams. Yeah. But they were guided by solving products Yeah. And And and transformers were immediately used. So Bert and mom, people underestimate how much because we measure search quality so religiously, Some of the biggest jumps in search quality in that period where search went ahead of everyone else was because of Bert and Mark. Yeah. Built transformers and used it immediately in search to improve language understanding, understanding web pages, understanding your queries
Yes.
Kept building better models. We had also started productizing it internally in the form of there were teams building something called Lambda. Mhmm. So, obviously, we weren't the first to ship that. Mhmm. But I think it's less to do with, like it was just research, and we weren't applying it in a product direction.
That, think, is just it's like you did this research. You then saw massive ROI from using it the way you intended, And then you didn't invent all of the products that were invented with us, but that's to be expected be
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