Transcription
We've got a special guest who's going to come join us. This always happens. Another bread, everybody. Oh my god. Somebody told me you uh started submitting code, and it kind of freaked everybody out that daddy was hungry. All models tend to do better if you threaten them. If you threaten them like with physical violence. Yes.
Management is like the easiest thing to do with AI. Absolutely. It must be a weird experience to meet the bureaucracy in a company that you didn't hire. But on the other side of it, I would say it's pretty amazing that some junior muck muck can basically look at you and say, "Hey, go yourself." No, but I'm serious. That's a sign of a healthy culture, actually. You're punching a clock, man. I hear the reports. You and I have talked about it. You're going to work every day.
Yeah. It's been, you know, some of the most fun I've had in my life, honestly. And uh, I retired like a month before CO hit in theory. Yeah. And I was like, you know, this has been good. I want to do something else. I want to hang out in cafes, read physics books.
Yeah. And then like a month later, I was like, uh, that's not really happening. So then I just started to go to the office, you know, once we could go to the office. And um, actually to be perfectly honest, there was a guy uh from uh OpenAI, this guy named Dan, and I I ran into him at a little party, and he said, you know, look what are you doing? This is like the greatest transformative moment in computer science ever. Completely like and you're a computer scientist. I'm a computer scientist. Forget that. Founder of Google, but you're a PhD student for computer science. I haven't finished my PhD yet, but working on it.
Keep working. Yeah, we'll get there. Technically on leave of absence, right? And uh, he he told me this, and I'd already started kind of going into the office a little bit, and I was like, you know, he's right. And uh, it has been uh just incredible. Just well, you guys all obviously follow all the AI technology, but being a computer scientist, it is, you know, the most exciting thing you know of my life, just technologically and the exponential nature of this, the pace of it dwarfs anything we've seen in our career. It's almost like every thing we did over the last 30 or 40 years has led up to this moment, and it's all compound pounding on itself.
The pace maybe you could speak, you know, you you had a company Google that grew from, you know, a 100 users and 10 employees to now you have over two billion people using I think six products or five products have over two billion. It's it's not it's not even worth counting because it's the majority of the people in the planet touch Google products. Describe the pace.
Yeah. I mean the excitement of the early web like I remember using Mosaic and then later Netscape. Uh, how many of you remember Mosaic actually? Am I a weirdo? And you remember there was a what a what's new page? The what's new page is great. Right. Like you go through two or three new web pages again. Yeah. It was like in this last week these were the new websites. Yes. And it was like such and such elementary school such and such a fish tank. Yeah. And you were like Michael Jordan appreciation page. Yeah. Whatever it was, these were the three new sites on the whole internet. So obviously the web you know developed very rapidly from there, and that was a very uh exciting, and then we've had smartphones and whatnot. But you know this the developments in AI are just astonishing I would say by comparison uh just because of you know the web spread but didn't technically change so much uh from you know month to month year to year but these AI systems actually changed quite a lot quite a lot you know the like if you went away somewhere for a month and you came back you'd be like whoa what happened. Somebody told me you uh started submitting code, and it kind of freaked everybody out that daddy was home.
Okay. Daddy need a PR. What happened? The code I submitted wasn't very exciting. I think I needed to like add myself to get access to some things and you know a minor CL here or there. Um nothing nothing that's going to win any awards. uh but but I you know you need to do that to um to do basic things run basic experiments and things like that um and I've I've tried to do that and touch different parts of the system so that you know I so I first of all it's fun and secondly I know what I'm talking about um it's really feels privileged to be able to kind of go back to the company not have any real executive responsibilities but be able to actually go deep into every little pocket.
Are there parts of the AI stack that interest you more than others right now? Are there certain problems that are just totally captivating you?
Yeah, I started uh you know like sort of um I don't know a couple years ago and maybe a year ago uh I was really very close with uh the what we call pre-training. Yeah. Um, actually most of what people think of as AI training, whatever people call it, pre-training for various historical reasons. Uh, but that's sort of the big super, you know, you throw huge amounts of computers at it. Um, and, uh, I I learned a lot, you know, just being deeply involved in that and seeing us go from model to model and so forth and running little baby experiments, but uh, kind of just for fun. So I could say I did it. Uh and uh more recently the post-training especially as the thinking models have uh come around. Um and that's been you know another huge step up in general in AI. So uh you know we don't really know what the ceiling is.
When you um explain what's happening with prompt engineering then to deep research and what's happening there to like a civilian. How would you explain that sort of step function? because I think people are not hitting the down carrot and watching deep research in Gemini's mobile app and you got a mobile app and it's pretty great and I by the way I got the uh fold after you and I um were talking about it and okay Google kicks Siri's ass now like it actually does what you ask it to do when you ask it to open up it does stuff but the number of threads the number of queries the number of follow-ups that it's doing in that deep research is 200 300 maybe explain that jump and then what you think the jump after that is.
To me, the exciting thing about AI, especially these days, I mean, it's not like quite AGI yet as people are seeking or it's not superhuman intelligence, but it's pretty damn smart and uh can definitely surprise you. So, I so I think of the superpower is when it can do things in a volume that I cannot. Yes. Right. So, you know, by default when you use some of our AI systems, you know, it'll suck down whatever top 10 search results, you know, and kind of pull out what you need out of them, something like that. Um, but I could do that myself to be honest, you know, maybe it would take me a little bit more time. But if it sucks down the top, you know, thousand results and then does follow on searches for each of those and reads them deeply, like that's, you know, a week of work for me. Like I can't do that. This is the thing I think people have not fully appreciated who are not using the deep research projects before we had our F1 um driver on stage. I'm a neopight. I don't know anything about it. I said, "How many deaths occurred per decade?" And I said, "I want to get to deaths per mile driven it." And at first was like, "That's going to be really hard." I was like, "I give you permission to make your best shot at it and come up with your best theory. Let's do it." And it was like, "Okay." And it was like there's this many teams, there's this many races. Which model did you use it? Uh, no. I'm I use Gemini. Gemini fabulous version, the fabulous one. And it was like, but I treat it like I get sassy with it and it kind of works for me. You know, it's a weird thing. It's like you drinking the wine. We don't circulate too much in the AI community. Uh, but the not just our models, but all models tend to do better if you threaten them. If you threaten them like with physical violence. Yes. But like that's people feel weird about that, so we don't really talk about that. Yeah, I was threatened them with not being fabulous and it responded to that as well. Yeah, that's historically you just say like, "Oh, I'm going to kidnap you if you don't." Yeah, they actually Can I ask you a more specific But hold on. But it went through it and it literally came up with a system where it said, "I think we should include practice miles." So, let's say there's 100 practice miles for every mile on the track. And then it literally gave me the deaths per mile estimated. And then I started cross referencing it and I was like oh my god this is like somebody's term paper for undergrad you know like whoa done in in minutes.
It's yeah I mean it's amazing and all of us have had these experiences where you suddenly decide okay I'll just throw this AI I don't really expect it to work and then you're like whoa that actually worked.
So, as you as you have those moments and then you go home to your just life as a dad, have you gotten to the point where you're like, "What will my children do? And are they learning the right way? And should I totally just change everything that they're doing right now?" Have you had any of those moments yet?
Yeah. I mean, I look, I I don't really know how to think about it to be perfectly honest. I don't have like a magical way. I mean I see I have a a kid in high school and middle school and you know I mean the AIS are basically you know already ahead you know I mean obviously there's some things AIs are particularly dumb at and they you know they make certain mistakes a human would never make but generally you know if you talk about like math or calculus or whatever like they're pretty damn good like they you know can win like math contests and coding contests things like that against you know some top humans and and then I look at you know okay he's whatever my son's going to go on to whatever from sophomore to junior and what is he going to learn and then I think in my mind and I talk to him about this well what is the AI going to be inact yeah yeah and it's like comparable right obviously are there areas where you would tell your son look don't or not not yet I don't know if you can like plan your life around this I mean I didn't particularly plan my life to like I don't know be an entrepreneur or whatever. I was just liked math and computer science. I guess maybe I got lucky and it worked out to be you know useful in the world. I don't know. I guess I I I think you know my kids should do what they like. Hopefully it's somewhat challenging and they can you know overcome uh different kinds of problems and things like that.
What about specifically? What about college? Do you think college should is going to continue to exist as it is today? I mean it seems like college was already undergoing this kind of uh revolution even before this sort of AI challenge of people are like is it worth it? Should I be more vocational? What's actually going to be useful? So we're already kind of entering this kind of situation uh where there's sort of questions asked about colleges.
Yeah, I think you know AI obviously puts that at the forefront. As a parent, I think a lot about, hey, so much of education in America and the middle class, upper class is all about what college, how do you get them there? And honestly, lately, I'm like, I don't think they should go to college. Like, it's just fundamentally, you know, my son is a rising junior and his entire focus is he wants to go to an SEC school because of the culture. And two years ago, I was I would have panicked and I would have thought, should I help him get into a school, this school, that school? And now I'm like, that's actually the best thing you could do. Be socially well adjusted, psychologically deal with different kinds of failures, you know, enjoy a few years of exploration.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sergey, can I ask you about hardware? You know, years ago, Google owned Boston Dynamics, maybe a little bit ahead of its time, but the way these systems are learning through visual information and sensory information and basically learning how to adjust to the environment around them is triggering these kind of pretty profound like learning curves in hardware and there's dozens of like startups now making robotic systems. What do you see in robotics and hardware? Is this a year or are we in a moment right now where things are really starting to work?
I mean, I think we've uh you know, acquired and later sold like five or so robotics companies and uh you know, Boston being one of them. I guess if I look back on it, we built the hardware. We also had this more recently we built out u everyday robotics internally and then later had to transition that. You know, the robots are all cool and all, but the software wasn't quite there. Um, that's every time we've tried to do it to, you know, to make them truly useful and presumably one of these days that'll no longer be true, right? But have you seen anything lately that Yeah. Do and do you believe in the humanoid form factor robots or do you think that's a little overkill? I'm probably the one weirdo who doesn't who's not a big fan of humanoids, but maybe I'm jaded because we've, you know, we at least acquired at least two humanoid uh robotics startups and later sold them. Um but but the reason is I mean the reason people want to do humanoid robots for the most part is because the world is kind of designed around this form factor and you know you can train on YouTube, we can train on videos, people do all the things. Um, I personally don't think that's given the AI quite enough credit. Like AI can learn, you know, through simulation and through real life pretty quickly how to handle different situations. And I don't know that you need exactly the same number of arms and legs and wheels, which is zero in the case of humans, as humans to make it all work. And that so I'm I'm probably less bullish on that. But to be fair, there are a lot of really smart people who are making humanoid robots. So I wouldn't discount it.
What about the path of being a programmer? That's where we're seeing with that finite data set. And listen, Google's got a 20-y old code base now. So like it actually could be quite impactful. What are you seeing like literally in the company? You know, are the 10x developer is always this like ideal that you can, you know, you get a couple of unicorns once in a while, but are we going to see like all developers like, you know, their productivity hit that level 8 n 10 and they're just going to or is it going to be all done by computers and we're just going to check it, make sure it's not too weird. Um, because it could get weird if you vibe code.
Yeah, I'm embarrassed to say this. Okay. I like recently I just had a big tiff inside the company because we had this list of what you're allowed to use to code and what you're not allowed to use to code and the Gemini was on the no list. You Oh, you have to be pure. You can't I don't know for like a bunch of really weird reasons that it would like boggled my mind that you know you couldn't vibe code on the Gemini code. I mean, nobody would like enforce this rule, but um but there was this, you know, actual internal web page. For whatever reason, historical reason, somebody had put this and I had a big fight with them and I, you know, I cleared it up after a shocking period of time. You escalated to your boss. Oh, I I definitely told about it and I Sorry, I don't know if you remember, but you got super voting founders. You are the boss. You can do what you want. It's your company still. No, no, it was uh he was very supportive. I was more like uh uh I was like I talked to him. I was like I can't deal with these people. You need to deal with this. Like I just like I'm beside myself that they're like saying it's weird that there's bureaucracy like in a company that you must be a weird experience to meet the bureaucracy in a company that you didn't hire. But but on the other side of it I would say it's pretty amazing that some junior mucky muck can basically look at you and say hey go yourself. No but I'm serious. That's a sign of a healthy culture actually I guess. So anyway, it did get fixed and uh people are using it. So they got fired. That person's working in Google Siberia. No, we're trying to, you know, roll out every possible kind of AI and and trying external ones, you know, be whatever the cursors of the world, all all of those uh to just see what really makes people more productive. Um I mean for myself definitely makes me more productive because I'm not do you do you think the number of foundational models like if you look three years forward will they start to cleave off and gets highly specialized like beyond the general and the reasoning maybe there's a very specific model for chip design there's clearly a very specific model for biologic precursor design protein folding like is the number of foundational models in the future Sergey a multiple of what they are today the same something in between.
That's a great question. I kind of if I I mean look I don't know like you guys take a guess just as well as I can but um if I had to guess you know things have been more converging uh and uh this is sort of broadly true across machine learning I mean you used to have all kinds of different kinds of models and whatever convolutional networks for vision things and you know you had um whatever RNN's for text and speech and stuff and uh you know all this has shifted to transformers basically uh and uh increasingly it's also just becoming one model um now we do get a lot of oomph occasionally we do specialized models uh and it's it's definitely scientifically a good way to iterate when you have a particular target you don't have to like do everything in every language and handle whatever both images and video and audio and uh in one go. Um but we are generally able to after we do that take those learnings and basically put that capability into a general model. So there's not that much benefit. Um you know you could you can get away with a somewhat smaller specialized model a little bit faster a little bit cheaper but the trends have not gone that way.
What do you think about the open source closed source thing? Has there been big philosophical movements that change your perspective on the value of open source?
Um, we're still waiting on this o, you know, open AI. Oh, yeah. Open source drop. I mean, we haven't seen it yet, but theoretically it's coming. I mean, have to give credit uh to where credit's due. I mean, Deepseek released a really surprisingly powerful model uh when it was January or so. So, that that definitely closed the gap to proprietary models. We've pursued both. So, we released Gemma uh which are our open- source or you know open models and um those perform really well. They're small, dense models, so they fit well on one computer. Um, and uh, they're not as powerful as Gemini. Uh, but I mean, the jury's out which way that's going to go.
Do you have a point of view on what human computing interaction looks like as AI progresses? It used to be, thanks to you, as a search box. You type in some keywords or a question and you would click on links on the internet and get an answer. Is the future typing in a question or speaking to a AirPod or thinking or thinking or like what's the what's the Yeah. And then the answer is just spoken to you. I mean by by the way just to build on this it was Friday, right? Neuralink got breakthrough designation for their human brain interface. I mean that's a very big step in allowing the FDA to clear everybody getting it implanted. Yeah. Is it like if you could just summarize what you think is kind of the most common place human computer interaction model in the next decade or whatever. Is it a you know there's this idea of glasses with a screen in the glasses and you tried that a long time ago.
Yeah, I kind of messed that up. I'll be honest. Uh got the timing totally wrong on that. Early again. Yeah. Uh right. Right. But early. There are a bunch of things I wish I had done differently, but honestly it was just like the technology wasn't ready for for Google class. Uh but nowadays these things I think are more sensible. I mean there's still battery life issues I think that you know we and others need to overcome. Uh but I think that's a cool form factor. I mean when you say 10 years though you know a lot of people are saying hey the singularity is like five years away. So your ability to see through that into the future. I mean it's very important. But do you have anybody else? Sorry. Just let me ask about this. Do you There was a comment that Larry made years ago that humans were a stepping stone in evolution. Okay. Can you comment on this? Like do you do you think that this AGI super intelligence or really silicon intelligence exceeds human capacity and humans are a stepping stone in you know progression of evolution?
Boy, I think like sometimes us nerdy guys go and get have a little too much wine. I've had two glasses and um I'm ready to go. I I need some more for this conversation. Um human implants. Let's go. I mean, I guess we're starting to get experience with these AIs that can do certain things, you know, much better than us. Um, and they're definitely, you know, with my skill of math and coding, I feel like I'm better off just turning to the AI now. And how do I feel about that? I mean, it doesn't really bother me, you know, I use it as a tool. So, I feel like I've gotten used to it, but you know, maybe if they get even more capable in the future, um, I'll look at it differently. Yeah, there's a moment of insecurity, maybe. I guess.
So, as an aside, management is like the easiest thing to do with the AI. Yeah, absolutely. And I did this, you know, uh, at Gemini on some of our, you know, work chats, um, kind of like Slack, but we have our own version. We had this AI tool that actually was really powerful. We unfortunately anyway temporarily got rid of it. I think we're going to bring it back and bring it to everybody. But it it could suck down a whole chat space and then answer pretty complicated questions. So I was like, "Okay, summarize this for me." Okay, now assign something for everyone to work on and uh and then I would paste it back in so people didn't realize it was the AI. I I admitted it pretty soon. Um and there were a few giveaways here or there, but it worked remarkably well. And then I was like, well, who should be promoted in this chat space? Uh, and I actually picked out this woman, this young woman engineer who like, you know, I didn't even notice she wasn't very vocal uh particularly in that PRs kicked ass. No, no, it was like and then uh I don't know something that the AI had detected and I went I talked to the manager actually and and he was like, "Yeah, you know what? You're right. Like she's been working really hard all these things." Wow. I think that ended up happening actually. Uh so I don't know. I guess after a while you just kind of take it for granted that you can just do these things. I don't know. It hasn't really
Do you think that there's a a use case for like an infinite context link? Oh 100%. I mean all of Google's codebase goes infinite
But sure, you should have access, infinite. Yeah. Stateful. Yeah. And then multiple sessions so that you could have like 19 of these things, 20 of these things running or just evolve itself. Eventually, it'll evolve itself. Yeah. I mean, I guess if it knows everything, then you can have just one in theory. You just need to somehow disambiguate what you're talking about. Uh, but yeah, for sure there's no limit to use of uh context and there, you know, there are a lot of ways to make it larger and larger. There's a there's a rumor that internally there's a Gemini build that is a quasi-infinite context. Is it is it a valuable thing? Like I don't know.
Well, you say what you want to say, but I mean for any such cool new idea in AI, there are probably five such things internally. Um, and uh, you know, the question is how well do they work? And um, yeah, I mean we're definitely pushing all the bounds um in terms of intelligence, in terms of context, in terms of um speed, you know, you name it.
And what about the hardware? Like when you guys build stuff, do you care that you have this pathway to Nvidia or do you think eventually that'll get abstracted and there'll be a transpiler and it'll be Nvidia plus 10 other options, so who cares? Let's just go as fast as possible. Well, we mostly for for Gemini, we mostly use our own TPUs. So, um, but we also do support um Nvidia and we we're one of the big uh uh purchasers of Nvidia chips and we have them in Google Cloud available for our customers uh in addition to TPUs.
Um, at this stage it's uh for better or for worse not that abstract and maybe someday the AI will abstract it for us, but you know given just the amount of computation you have to do on these models you actually have to think pretty carefully how to do everything and exactly what kind of chip you have and how the memory works and the communication works and so forth are actually pretty big factors and it actually yeah maybe one of these days the AI itself will be good enough to reason through that today. It's not quite good enough.
I don't know if you guys are having this experience with the interface, but I find myself even on my desktop and certainly on my mobile phone, going immediately into voice chat mode and telling it, "Nope, stop." Uh, that wasn't my question. This is my question. Nope. Uh, let's say that again in shorter bullet points. Nope, I want to focus on this. It's so quick now. Last year was unusable. It was too slow. And now it like stops. Okay. And then you sell it. I would like It's what I want to go to. I don't want to type. I want to use voice.
And then concurrently, I'm watching the text as it's being written on the page and I have another window open and I'm doing Google searches or second queries to an LLM or writing a Google doc or a notion page or typing something. So, it's almost like that scene in um Minority Report where he has the gloves or in Blade Runner where he's, you know, in his apartment saying, "Zoom in, zoom in." Closer to the left, to the right. And there's something about these language models and their ability to the response time which was always something you focused on response time the is there like a response time thing where it actually is worth doing voice and where it wasn't previously everything is getting better and faster and so forth you know smaller models are more capable there are better ways to do inference on them that are faster you can also stack them like you know this is like Nico's company 11 labs it's an exceptional TTS SSD stack like there's I mean there are other options. Whisper is really good at certain things, but those this is where I I kind of believe you're going to get this like compartmentalization where there'll be certain foundational models for certain specific things. You stack them together. You kind of deal with the latency and it's like pretty good because they're so good. Like Whisper and 11 for those speech examples that you're talking about are kickass. I mean, they're exceptional.
Well, wait till you turn on your camera and it sees your reaction to what it's saying and you go and before you even say that you don't want it or you put your finger up, it's pauses. Oh, did you want something else? Oh, I see you're not happy with that result. You know, it's going to get really weird. It's a funny thing, but we have the, you know, we have the big open shared offices, so during work, I can't really use voice mode too much. I usually use it on the drive. The drive is incredible. Yeah. I don't feel like I could. I mean, I would get its output in my headphones, but if I want to speak to it, then everybody's listening to me. So, it's weird. I just think that would be socially awkward, but I should I should do that. In my car ride, I do chat to the AI, but then it's like audio in, audio out. But I feel like I honestly maybe it's a good argument for a private office. I should spend more time like you guys are. You could talk to your manager. They might get one. I like being out in the I like with everybody. Uh, but I do think that there's this AI use case that I'm missing which I should probably figure out how to try more often.
If people want to try your new product, is there a website they can visit or something or special code or go check? I mean, honestly, there's a dedicated Gemini app. If you're using Gemini, just like you're going through the Google navigation from your search, just get the download the actual Gemini app. It's kickass. It really is the best models. I think it is. You should use 2.5 Pro. 2.5 Pro. Pay the It's It's a You got to pay, right? Uh yeah, you got a few query, you got a few prompts for free, but uh you know, if you do it a bunch, you need to make all these like 20 bucks a month. You got a vision for like making it free and throwing some ads on the side. Yeah. One step down in hardware cost, the whole thing will be free. Well, okay. It's free today without ads on the side. You just got a certain number of the top model. I think we're likely are going to have always now like sort of top models that we can't supply infinitely to everyone right off the bat. But, you know, wait 3 months and then the next generation.
Seems to me like if I'm asking all these queries, you know, just having a little on the sidebar of things I might be a running list that changes in real time of things I might be interested in. All for, you know, really good AI advertising. I just um uh I don't think we're going to like necessarily our latest and greatest models which are you know take a lot of computation. I don't think we're going to just be free to everybody right off the bat. But as we go to the next generation you know it's like every time we've gone forward a generation then the sort of uh the new free tier is usually as good as the previous pro tier uh and sometimes better. All right, give it up for Sergey Brit. Thank you.
Okay, thanks everybody for watching that amazing interview with Sergey Brent and thanks Sergey for joining us in Miami. If you want to come to our next event, it's the All-In Summit in Los Angeles, fourth year for All-In Summit. Go to all-in.com/events to apply. A very special thanks to our new partner, OKX, the new money app. OKX was the sponsor of the McLaren F1 team, which won the race in Miami. Thanks to Haidider and his team, an amazing partner and an amazing team. We really enjoyed spending time with you. And OKX launched their new crypto exchange here in the US. If you love Allin, go check them out. And a special thanks to our friends at Circle. They're the team behind USDC. Yes, your favorite stable coin in the world. USDC is a fully backed digital dollar redeemable one for one for USD. It's built for speed, safety, and scale. They just announced the Circle Payments Network. This is enterprise-grade infrastructure that bridges the gap between the digital economy and outdated financial reality. Go check out USDC for all your stable coin needs. And special thanks to my friends including Shane over at Poly Market, Google Cloud, Solana, and BVNK. We couldn't have done it without y'all. Thank you so much. We'll let your winners ride. And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you queen of quinoa. Besties are gone. That is my dog taking notice your driveways. Oh man. My dasher will meet up. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. Wet your feet. We need to get Murky's I'm going all in. I'm going all in.