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Google & Alphabet(谷歌母公司) Seo Chundar Pichai(下称皮查伊) 的最新采访出炉!
The questions are wonderful, and a few questions outline them smoothly: the current state of the Google empire and the future of artificial intelligence!
Bloomberg reporter Emily Chang (Emily) has a sharp questioning style that goes straight to the point. From whether Google is temporarily behind in this wave of AI technology trends, to whether Pichai himself is the most suitable candidate for the "boss" of the Google empire with an overly cautious and conservative leadership style, he has been interrogated like a cocoon.
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A series of questions also made Pichai sweat coldly! When faced with sensitive topics such as the impact of AI content generation (especially AI search) on Google's advertising-centric business model, he began to parry and began to dodge these questions.
Netizens couldn't help but complain: Her question hit the nail on the head, and his answer was cautious!
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Undoubtedly, the questions in this interview are an excellent starting point for understanding Google. As the comments say: the CEO of a $2 trillion company takes a lot of time out to be tortured, which is not something you see every day! I learned a lot from Pichai's leadership philosophy and look forward to the endgame of this long game.
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The following is a summary of the content of the interview video:
1. Twenty years of Pichai and Google
It's hard to remember life before Google now, and it changed everything: the way we lived, the way we worked, the way we communicated, how we rode our Google-painted bikes everywhere. Google has been a gateway to the internet for more than two decades, and now there are many doors (like Tik Tok, X, ChatGPT...). ）。 Google may no longer be the first place you look for answers.
So how are they going to deal with all this?
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Pichai is at a critical juncture in his own right, as CEO of Google and its parent company, Alphabet. He proved himself to be a talented product leader as well as a manager of peace before rising to the top.
He leads a tech giant, and the cosmopolitan company operates more like a micro-state.
He is also responsible for YouTube, DeepMind, Cloud, and of course, most importantly, Google Search.
Pichai has been pursuing a well-crafted strategy for a long time: to infuse AI into every corner of the business.
However, this deliberate planning was unexpectedly disrupted by longtime rivals Microsoft and OpenAI – whose chatbot ChatGPT appears to have knocked Google off its throne and challenged its company culture.
ChatGPT has sounded a red alert for Google and has sparked an industry-wide frenzy for AI, a wave not seen since the internet. But for Pichai, this frenzy is only part of the long game.
Emily: I see your 20th anniversary is approaching.
Pichai: yes, it was last week, and it came quietly.
Emily: Do you feel like you've been here for 20 years?
Pichai: I haven't, you know, time flies, and my kids were born when I started working at Google, so the whole thing flew by like that.
Emily: Google is known for its non-traditional job interview questions. Do you remember your interview questions? For example, have you ever been asked how many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
Pichai: Thankfully, I remember very well that I was interviewing on April 1st, which was April 1st, 2004, and there were rumors that Gmail was about to launch. So all my interview questions are about Gmail. People (interviewees) want to know what I think of this product.
Emily: That's definitely not an April Fool's joke.
Pichai: I'm sure they did launch Gmail. I never allow the team to launch any product on April Fool's Day, though, which I think is too confusing.
2. Google's stock price soars and AI mania
Emily: You've just had an explosive quarter. Google stock has jumped more than it has been in a long time. It feels a bit like a defense of your work, or as cricket says, the bat is talking.
Pichai: In a lot of ways, you know, we've worked very hard to set goals like this for the company. You know, in 2016, when I was just CEO, the first thing I did was say that the company should be AI-first.
For me, we're just getting started, and I think it's going to be the start of an extraordinary decade of innovation, so I'm very excited about that.
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Emily: AI has been around for decades, but it seems like everything is exploding right now. How do you make sense of this AI frenzy and scale?
Pichai: That's how all tech cycles are, right?
Emily: You know, this time it feels different, it's bigger, right?
Pichai: yes. We still have a long way to go, but we are in the early stages of AI. So, you know, you're going to feel that excitement, that frenzy, but I think we're ready for that, so just go with the flow and embrace AI.
Emily: How do you and your kids try to use AI at home?
Pichai: He uses Google Lens to do his homework, and I don't want to get him in trouble (laughs), but the class allows it. Sometimes he asks me questions about math that I don't know, and I pretend to think when I'm lazy and use Google Lens to figure out the answers.
Emily: You grew up in Chennai, India, what was your family background like? What has influenced you to get to where you are today?
Pichai: My parents always emphasized the importance of learning and knowledge, which in some ways aligned with Google's mission and always resonated deeply with me.
So what does this company mean to my middle-class family, I perceive (technology in) our lives through the advent of gadgets, and we waited five years to have a phone, which was a turntable phone, but when it came to our home, you know, it changed everyone's lives.
I remember the first time we got TV and suddenly we were able to watch sports. I used to ride my bike far to school, but, you know, there were no gears on the bike and I had to go uphill. But years later, I got a bike with gears, and it was like, wow, this thing made a dramatic difference.
I never take technology for granted. You know, I've always been optimistic about how technology can have an impact.
Emily: You've been CEO for 10 years. How have you changed during this time?
Pichai: I think the main thing is that when you've done it for a long time, you start to understand patterns. When you come across something, there's a sense of déjà vu that you know you've encountered before, so I think that helps you with pattern matching and handle it more efficiently.
But a lot of things are coming at you at the same time, there's a lot of noise, and most of it doesn't matter, so you need to have the ability to distinguish between the signal and the noise, and focus on the few things you need to focus on. I think I've gotten better at that over the years.
Emily: I heard that Sergey is back and is now working on AI as well. How are Larry and Sergey involved right now, and what advice did they give you?
Pichai: I talk to them regularly, and Sergey actually spends more time in the office, and he really spends a lot of time in actual coding. You know, some of my most enjoyable memories of the past year are sitting in front of a big screen with Sergey and looking at the loss curve as we trained these models.
I think one of the advantages they have is that they don't get bogged down in everyday things. So sometimes when I talk to them, it allows all of us to take a step back and look at the blueprint further afield, and I think that's really important when you're dealing with something of this scale.
*Editor's note: In 2015, Google underwent organizational changes and established its parent company, Alphabet. In the midst of this change, co-founder Larry Page became the CEO of Alphabet, and Sergey Brin became the president of Alphabet.
3. AI will inject new vitality into search engines, and the core of the business model will remain unchanged
Emily: The decisions Google makes affect how billions of people access information, and the nature of what users access it. In the age of AI, AI search seems to pose a threat to Google, although the core technology used by Google's competitors was actually invented by Google.
Google researchers invented the transformer, which is literally the T in GPT. Do you wish you had taken advantage of this technology earlier?
Pichai: The use of Transformer in search has made Google Search a huge quality boost compared to other products. So we've injected transformers into our products, and we have the opportunity to do that better with generative AI and the Gemini family of models. There will be more breakthroughs in this area. But more importantly, we're pushing this issue.
Emily: If the new Google just gets more AI. You know, sometimes AI is very helpful, but sometimes it's still very wrong. Where do you draw the line?
Pichai: I think the differentiating part of Google search is that it always links to various sources, although sometimes we give answers. We've been doing access and searching for years, and now we're just using generative AI to do just that.
Emily: So the link is here to stay.
Pichai: yes, and you know, I think that's going to be a big part of the search always. Sometimes they want quick answers.
My son has celiac disease, so we quickly asked if something was gluten-free. We just want to know, but usually that leads to more things, and then you want to explore more. I think understanding that meeting all of these needs is part of the uniqueness of search.
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Emily: Some leading computer scientists say that search is getting worse, more SEO (search engine optimization), spam, etc. Do you agree with them?
Pichai: Whenever there's a technological development, you're going to see an explosion of new content, and AI is going to do that. So for us, we're looking at this as a challenge, and I actually think that there's going to be a hard time for somebody to completely circumvent the negative effects, right? So we try to define a high-quality product under AI technology, and I think that will be the core of success.
Emily: Google makes a lot of money next to the links generated by Google searches. If the chatbot gives you an answer instead of a link, sometimes the user may refer to the answer more than the link, is this in the midst of an attack on Google's business model?
Pichai: We've found that people always want choice, including in the business sector, which is a basic need, (so the link will remain). I think that we've been refining the process of AI search, we've been experimenting with advertising, and we've been experimenting with advertising, and we're seeing the way data is now displayed in search, and those basic principles are going to stay the same.
4. In the next 10 years, Google search will still be the entrance for people to verify the truth
Emily: Gemini's original generation of images of Asian Nazis and Black Founding Fathers, you say that's unacceptable. If you look at any picture of the Founding Fathers, you'll see old white males. People call this "woken" AI. It's not just happening here, it's happening across the industry. How does the model generate something it has never seen before?
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Pichai: Google is a company that provides products to users around the world, and there are some common problems. For example, people come and ask, show me pictures of school teachers or doctors or nurses. We have people from Indonesia or the United States, how do you do that properly for our global user base?
Obviously, the mistake is that we overapply (diversity), including where it shouldn't. So that's a bug. You know, so we did it wrong.
Emily: Would you say it's a good thing to do?
Pichai: In this particular case? yes, you know, we're rightfully expected to meet a high standard, and I think we're clearly taking responsibility for that, and we're going to do it well.
Emily: How concerned are you about AI-generated content ruining the accuracy of searches? For example, some AI-synthesized photos appear in the search results, but it never happens.
Pichai: The challenge and the opportunity for everybody is how to have the ability to determine objectively and truthfully what is in a world where there will be a lot of synthetic content.
I think that's going to be part of defining search in the next decade, right? People often come directly to Google to see if something they see somewhere is actually happening. This is a common pattern we see. We are making progress, but it will be an ongoing journey.
Emily: Our AI system is running out of all the training data, and companies are using the data generated by the AI to train their models. Is it risky to do so?
Pichai: yes, I think, through all of this, you're creating new knowledge, and these models are developing reasoning skills, right? You're making progress to improve the intelligence of these models, and I think those are the frontiers that we need to prove, you know, you can do that through the use of AI technology.
5. There are still many opportunities in the early stage of AI, denying that Google "caught up with the late set"
Emily: Is LLMS approaching a plateau?
Pichai: I would be surprised if large machine learning models (LLMS) were the only thing we needed to do to make progress. We're investing a lot of computing and resources to push the talents of AI researchers to make the next generation of breakthroughs.
Emily: When you look at the whole AI big picture, it feels like Google missed the big moment — OpenAI grabbed it, and a new AI program called ChatGPT made its debut online.
Pichai: It's as revolutionary as the internet.
Emily: A lot of people today talk about Microsoft, and the huge bet it put into AI, and how it suddenly surpassed Google, and no one knows the answer clearly. If you could travel back in time, what would you do to do better?
Pichai: To be clear, I've taken a long-term perspective. When the internet first appeared, Google didn't even exist, right? But we were the first company to do search. We were the first company to do email, we were the first company to do browsers. So I look at this AI, you know we're in the earliest stages.
Emily: Your leadership style has been described as slow and steady, and can be overly cautious at times. You're often compared to other tech leaders who move fast and break the mold. How do you evaluate yourself?
Pichai: Well, I think I'm very different from that assessment.
One of the first things I did when I became CEO was to dramatically shift the company to focus on AI, and really invest more in YouTube and Cloud, building them into big businesses.
I think the bigger the company, the fewer decisions you make. But they need to be clear, and you have to point the whole company in that direction. Sometimes this involves leading the company forward. You build consensus because that's what gives you the most influence behind these decisions.
Emily: I mean, any leader in a position like yours has to be willing to listen to criticism. I'm not going to make you read those mean tweets like a late-night show, but I do have some: Does Google have to go through the legal process for everything (sarcastic conventional)? Google doesn't have a single visionary leader, not one.
Do you think you're the right person to lead Google?
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Pichai: It's a privilege to lead this company. You know, people tend to focus on this micro moment, but in the context ahead, it's so small. And, you know, when I look at the opportunities ahead of what we're doing, and for the first time, all of these things have a common lever technique, and that's AI. You know, I'm going to put a lot of chips, at least from my point of view, on Google.
6. Google has a great opportunity in AI, and companies that don't innovate will be reduced to dinosaur fossils
Emily: So, can you walk around the corporate campus without being stopped?
Pichai: Being able to walk and see people, I really like it.
Emily: I saw a dinosaur statue in the distance, which is a good reminder of how worried you are about turning into a dinosaur in a world where technology is moving so fast?
Pichai: On the technology side, I think if you don't innovate to stay ahead of the curve, it's inevitable that any company will have this fate.
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Emily: How many AI moments do you have that force you to act and think differently? Because sometimes it looks like you're on the defensive.
Pichai: We've been working on this for a while. You know, a lot of the groundbreaking foundational technology in this space comes from Google. So for me, this moment has really guided the company to this moment over the past year.
Emily: They're there, the I/O (Google Developer Conference) tent.
Pichai: The I/O is held once a year. We can pretend we're on the concert stage, the difference is that we're talking about technology.
Emily: So Google I/O is kind of like the state of Google Federated. What's the keyword for the year?
Pichai: It's less about specific products and more about the journey we're taking, our vision of how AI is transforming our products and how we're bringing it to the table.
Emily: Alphabet used to be thought of as a collection of these moonshots, but a lot of these projects have been stripped off or reincorporated into Google or shut down. How should we think about Alphabet today? What is the new Google?
Pichai: When we think about the boundaries of Google and Alphabet, the stakes behind it are the same. You'll invest in in-depth technology and computer science and apply it to solve people's problems. So I don't think that part will change, when you're making big bets. By definition, if you haven't experienced some failures, you're not aiming big enough.
Emily: When you look back at the S-1, you say, Google is not a traditional company. You can spend 20% of your time on personal projects. Google has created this bottom-up culture where everyone has a voice, it's very transparent, and the benefits are great, but has it gone too far? Has it become a culture of rights?
Pichai: I think the part that makes Google unique is that I think there's a vibrant, open-debate culture. So I think it's very important to keep that up. I think we're still a company and there are a lot of ways for employees to have a voice, and I think that makes the company better.
Emily: You recently fired Google employees who protested against a contract with the Israeli government for cloud services. For a company that has historically welcomed a variety of perspectives, this seems like a noticeable change of tone. Why did you take this position?
Pichai: I think when we have some special circumstances, including this one, some employees, you know, go beyond the principles in the contract and disrupt productivity in the workplace, or do it in a way that makes other people feel uncomfortable, I think we have to take action. That's what we're doing.
This has nothing to do with the topic they discuss. In the past few years, the company has grown a lot, and there are a lot of new people. I think, especially at this moment, the opportunity in front of us as AI evolves is huge, but it needs to be really focused on our mission.
Emily: Google has had several rounds of layoffs recently. Why this approach? Why not make a drastic cut all at once?
Pichai: We're reassigning people to our highest priorities. There are situations where you're simplifying your team, you're moving people to a team focused on a new area, removing layers of redundancy in order to increase velocity.
7. Fearless of Microsoft's competition, optimistic that China can go to the forefront of AI
Emily: Microsoft is obviously investing heavily in AI as well. We've already reported on their investment in OpenAI, actually in part because they're worried that Google will want to catch up. How do you feel about the competition?
Pichai: I've always held the view that when you're working in technology, there's always a lot of competition. We see this all the time. The way you stay ahead of the curve is through relentless innovation.
It has to be real, it always has to be, it's happening at a faster pace, but you know, technological change tends to get faster over time, so that's not surprising to me at all.
Emily: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has made some provocative remarks. "I hope that by innovating, they [Google] will have to stand up and show that they can dance. I want people to know that we can get them to dance, and I think it's going to be a good day. So, who is really choosing the dance music in this dance?
Pichai: I think one way you're doing things wrong is by listening to the noise outside and dancing to other people's music. I've always been very clear and I think we have a clear sense of what we need to do.
Emily: Google is under tremendous regulatory pressure both in the U.S. and overseas because of your dominance in search, video ads, app stores, etc. Some other large companies have split themselves in order to focus on their core business. Has Google thought about this?
Pichai: A lot of our products are put together in a way that provides value to the user, so I think that's a big part of what we've been able to compete on the Google Cloud Marketplace, because of our investment in AI, because search, has allowed us to do that and compete with other big companies like Amazon and Microsoft. So I think our approach drives innovation and increases the choice in the market.
Emily: What do you think is the future or potential of AI-powered hardware, and what role will Google play?
Pichai: I think with AI, you have the opportunity to rethink this in the next few years. I still think that the center of AI innovation will happen on smartphones, followed by glasses, and that's what I see.
Emily: The last time we talked, you told me that China is going to be at the forefront of AI, how should policymakers incorporate that into their decision-making?
Pichai: I think over time, we need to develop frameworks through which we can enable global collaboration to achieve AI safety. I know it sounds far away now, but we've done it in other areas, like nuclear technology, etc.
In a way, I think we're going to need that framework, so I expect that over time, we'll need to engage with China on important issues like AI security.
8. AI has a "black box" and humans are the same, and Google will eventually achieve AGI
Emily: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). What does this mean for you? Will we get there? When?
Pichai: It's not a better-defined phrase that means different things to different people. But I think if you define AGI as AI being able to become capable across a wide range of economic activities and be able to do that very well, I think that's one way to look at it.
Emily: So Google is going to take us into AGI.
Pichai: You know, we're committed to making foundational progress in a bold and responsible way, in the direction of AGI. So, you know, I'm going to focus on trying to do that and do that well.
Emily: You've said that even some things about AI, you don't understand. Will AI always be a bit of a black box?
Pichai: I'm kind of against that. I think, you know, humans are also often mysterious, and when people explain why they're doing something, you know, they're saying something. It's not entirely clear. Today, we are unable to understand many complex systems. AI will give us more insight and more visibility into many complex things.
Emily: When I asked Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, why we should trust him, he said "you shouldn't". Why should we trust Google?
Pichai: I shared the idea that no one should trust blindly. That's why it's important to have systems in place, where regulation is effective, to balance innovation and risk. But as these AI systems become more powerful, it shouldn't be based solely on a system of trust in people or companies.
Emily: We've talked a lot about opportunities. What is Google's biggest threat to the future?
Pichai: I think for all companies, especially for scale, you know, the biggest threat is not executing well enough.
Emily: Is there a healthy paranoia like not being a Tyrannosaurus rex?
Pichai: I think a quote from Andy Grove Sr., only paranoia survives. This is an important point, and I think this moment is no exception.
Emily: We'll look back at all of this with AI, does today's technology look all basic and primitive?
Pichai: I hope we will. You know my kids aren't surprised that touch screens or that they have this extraordinary computing power in their hands. So again, there's no reason why we shouldn't expand our computing power by a factor of 100,000 in a few years. This makes these seemingly advanced technologies today look like toys in the future. I sincerely hope so, otherwise, it means that we are not doing our job.
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