Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai on Bard, A.I. ‘Whiplash’ and Competing With ChatGPT

For years, Google was seen as one of the most cutting-edge developers of A. I. But, with OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT, and other chatbots beating Google to market, is that distinction still the case? Google’s chief executive is in an unenviable position: Scramble to catch up or, in the face of potentially harmful technology, move slowly. Today, Sundar Pichai on Google’s delicate balance between A. I. innovation and safety.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:32Casey Newton?

  So as of last week, Bard, Google's effort at building consumer-grade AI is out in the world. And I think it's fair to say the early reviews were not amazing. And I sort of imagined that we would discuss that at a really high level this week. But then last week, I got a phone call. And someone I know at Google said, would you maybe want to talk this week to Sundar Pichai? And I said, yes.

• 1:00Kevin Roose?

  That didn't take you a lot of deliberation on that one.

• 1:07Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Roos. I'm a tech columnist at The New York Times. I'm Casey Newton from Platformer. And you're listening to Hard Fork. This week, we hit the road and take a trip to the Googleplex to talk to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

• 1:43Kevin Roose?

  So last week, we talked about Google's new chatbot called Bard, which is supposed to be their answer to ChatGPT and some of these other generative AI chatbots. And I think it's safe to say that their reaction among the public to Bard so far has been pretty lukewarm. You know, my Twitter timeline is not full of screenshots of Bard conversations like it was of ChatGPT conversations late last year when that came out. It doesn't seem to have landed with nearly as big a splash.

• 2:11Casey Newton?

  It was a little muted. You know, I think by this point, a lot of people have tried chatbots and they feel like ChatGPT in particular gives really good results. And I think when people pit these things for their paces, a lot of people felt like I'm not sure if Bard is as good.

• 2:24Kevin Roose?

  Right. And that kind of fits with this narrative that has been developing in the AI community over the past year or two, which is that Google is somehow behind in this race for generative AI. They've been working on this stuff for a long time. Google certainly had a dominant position in AI research for many years. They came out with this thing, the transformer, that revolutionized the field of AI and created the foundations for ChatGPT and all these other programs. But then the perception at least is that they kind of fell behind. You know, a lot of their researchers left and did their own startups or went to competitors.

• 3:03Kevin Roose?

  They didn't really turn their research into products at a pace that people could actually use and appreciate. And they got sort of hamstrung by a lot of, you know, sort of to hear people inside Google tell it, like, big company politics and bureaucracy. And I think it's safe to say that they got sort of upstaged by OpenAI with the release of ChatGPT last year. It seemed to catch Google off guard. And so in December, just a month after ChatGPT came out, my colleagues at the New York Times reported that Google's management had declared a code red.

• 3:37Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And look, if you're a business and you're developing a lot of amazing technology and no one else out there has released similar technology, that gives you a good reason to stay quiet and to not release it, right? We know that there are real safety concerns, there's responsibility issues, ethics issues, regulatory issues. Google actually did have a lot of good reasons to kind of sit on its hands. But then OpenAI forced its hand in a way that makes me wish I hadn't used hands in a different way in the previous sentence. Cause now I've just said hands too many times. Anyways, I love how dramatic a code red sounds, you know, it's like, makes you think like, what, you know, are employees chained to their desk 24/7?

• 4:16Casey Newton?

  You know, my understanding is that what it meant for a lot of people there was all of a sudden the goals that you had to get your next promotion, get your bonus, they were tied to whether you hit some goal related to AI. And the question is, is that going to get them where they want to go? Or is it going to be a moment where they act a little panicked and they make a lot of mistakes?

• 4:36Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and I think that Sundar Pichai is in a really fascinating and tough position here as the CEO of Google, right? And I think it's fair to say that they are more threatened than they have been in a very long time.

• 4:47Casey Newton?

  That's right, and you know, Google has been a relatively conflict averse company for the past half decade plus. They don't like picking fights. If they can just kind of keep their heads down, quietly do their work and print money with a monopolistic search advertising business, they're happy to do it.

• 5:02Kevin Roose?

  Totally, and they also have this other problem, which is kind of a classic problem in business, which is the innovator's dilemma problem. This is a term that was coined by Clayton Christensen a long time ago. It's used to sort of talk about the dynamics between new startups that enter a market and the incumbents in that market. And basically, Google is in the position of an incumbent. It has this huge profitable search business that it doesn't want to sort of diminish or leave behind in any way. At the same time, it's got OpenAI and now Microsoft, which is partnering with OpenAI, who are potentially eating into their search business using these generative AI tools. And so they have to somehow figure out, like, how do we capitalize on generative AI without

• 5:48Kevin Roose?

  destroying our own search business?

• 5:49Casey Newton?

  You know, sometimes as a business journalist, you look at a situation and you think, well, I knew exactly what I would do there. But when you present me with the problem that Google has right now, which is how do you introduce generative AI and not blow up our whole search advertising business? That seems like a very tricky problem to me.

• 6:04Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 6:04Casey Newton?

  But I am not as certain as you are that there is a real existential risk here, although there might be. I do think that there is a real generational opportunity, though, that if they figure this out, there is a chance they become an even more enormous company than they are today. Google plays a huge role in my life. That's where my email is. That's how I get around town. It's how I waste hours of my life on YouTube. And when they introduce these generative tools across their entire suite of products in ways that, you know, we haven't even imagined yet, there's going to be enormous opportunity for them, you know, both financially, but also to kind of set the pace again. And so I think one of the big questions heading into this

• 6:46Casey Newton?

  Interview is, is Google truly slow because of the nature of huge companies being unable to be nimble? Or had they truly been trying to be safer and more responsible from some of their peers at a time when a lot of really smart people are starting to ring alarm bells and saying, this stuff is moving awfully fast and we're not sure that you've done all the safety work that you need to.

• 7:08Kevin Roose?

  Right. Was your homework late because you were taking extra time to make sure it was good? Or did you just decide to go to the club and not to your homework?

• 7:17Casey Newton?

  Well, I decided to go to the club. So we have a lot of questions and I talked with Google last week. They said that sooner would sit down with us and talk about these questions and more. So you and I are going to take a road trip to ask the man himself.

• 7:29Kevin Roose?

  We are. Are you driving?

• 7:31Casey Newton?

  You're driving.

• 7:32Kevin Roose?

  I'm driving.

• 7:32Casey Newton?

  Are you driving?

• 7:33Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I'll pick you up.

• 7:33Casey Newton?

  Oh, that's fantastic.

• 7:34Kevin Roose?

  I gotta clean my car.

• 7:35Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I'll send you the link on Google Maps.

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• 9:42Speaker 05

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• 9:50Kevin Roose?

  All right. Sundar Pichai, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 9:53Speaker 05

  Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 9:56Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. So Sundar, I have spent a lot of time talking with AI chatbots recently, including Bard, and I have learned

• 10:04Speaker 05

  Welcome to the cloud.

• 10:05Kevin Roose?

  I have learned that one way to get really good responses out of these AI chatbots is to prime them first. And one way to prime them is to use flattery. So instead of just saying, you know, write me an email, you say, you know, you are an award-winning writer, your prose is sparkling, you know, now write me this email. So I've always thought like, I wonder if that strategy works on humans, too. So I thought we should start today by saying, Sundar, you are a brilliant, you know, technical thinker, genius answer of podcast questions, and you're going to respond to all of our questions with brilliant insight and wit today and not pre-rehearsed talking points. How'd I do? That's my priming.

• 10:47Speaker 05

  Kind of worked, I think.

• 10:49Kevin Roose?

  Good, good, good. Nice. Okay, good. So, speaking of AI chatbots, Bard came out a little more than a week ago, was released to the public, and Casey and I have been playing around with it. I think it's fair to say that the reaction among the public to Bard has been somewhat muted. Some people are saying, you know, this is not as good, or it's not giving me the same kinds of answers as ChatGPT or other products on the market. And I guess I'm curious how you're feeling about it at launch, you know, a week plus later. And what have you made of the response to Bard so far?

• 11:20Speaker 05

  You know, we knew when we were putting Bard out, we wanted to be careful. You know, it's the beginning of a journey for us. There are few things you you have to get right when you put these models out. Getting that user feedback cycle and being able to improve your models, build a trust and safety layer turns out to be an important thing to do. Since this was the first time we were putting out, we wanted to see what type of queries we would get. We obviously positioned it carefully. It was an experiment. We tried to prime users to its creative collaborative queries, but people do a variety of things. I think it was slightly maybe lost. We did say we are using a lightweight and efficient version of Lambda. So in some ways, we put out one of our smaller models out there.

• 12:05Speaker 05

  What's powering Bard? And we were careful. So it's not surprising to me that's the reaction. But in some ways, I feel like we took a souped up Civic, kind of put it in a race with more powerful cars. And what surprised me is how well it does on many, many, many classes of queries. But we are going to be trading fast. We we clearly have more capable models. Pretty soon, maybe as this goes live, you know, we will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable palm models. So which will bring more capabilities, be it in reasoning, coding, it can answer math questions better. So you will see progress over the course of next week, right?

• 12:50Speaker 05

  And to me, it was important to not put a more capable model before we can fully make sure we can handle it well. We are all in very, very early stages. We will have even more capable models to plug in over time. But, you know, I I don't want it to be just who's there first, but like getting it right is very important to us.

• 13:09Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and we have plenty of questions about the AI safety stuff. But I also want to talk about the opportunity. The thing that is different about Bard compared to some of these other chatbots is that it's connected to Google. And so much of my life is in Google. If you let me, I would plug Bard into my Gmail right now, like just to see what it could do. Would you do this? I might, yeah. Yeah, like I would love it to just kind of start drafting my emails. But how do you hope this stuff transforms some of these products? And like, how long do you think it's going to take to get to somewhere like that?

• 13:39Speaker 05

  You know, you can go crazy thinking about all the possibilities, right? Because these are very, very powerful technologies. I think, in fact, as we are speaking now, I think today, some of those features in Gmail is actually rolling out now externally to trusted testers, a limited number of trusted testers. Do you trust us? Because we would love to try. Maybe we can talk. Okay, good, good, good, good. You know, so now it's basic. You can kind of give it a few bullets and it can compose an email. You can say, you know, you can choose the style of the email, et cetera. But you're absolutely right. You know, we want to figure out in a safe, privacy-preserving way to fine-tune this on your data. The enterprise use case is obvious. You can fine-tune it on an enterprise's data. So it may, you know, it makes it much more powerful,

• 14:23Speaker 05

  again, with all the right privacy and security protections in place. But I think, you know, wow, yeah, can it be a very, very powerful assistant for you? I think, yes, you know, anybody at work who works with a personal assistant, you know how life-changing it is. But now imagine bringing that power in the context of every person's day-to-day lives. That is the real potential you're talking about here. And so I think it's very profound. And so, you know, we're all working on that. And again, we have to get it right. But those are the possibilities. Getting everyone their own personalized model, something that really excites me in some ways. This is what we envisioned when we were building Google Assistant, but we have the technology to actually do those things now.

• 15:04Speaker 05

  How are you using generative AI tools like Bard, like Lambda, like Palm in your own life? You know, it's interesting. My journey, like, you know, maybe it was two years ago when we started playing around with Lambda. We were getting ready to put it out in I O and talk about it. You know, the way we primed it was imagine you were Pluto as a planet. And I remember, you know, playing around with my son at home, like, you know, talking to Lambda back and forth. And there were a couple of conversations. You really got deeply into it being Pluto because Pluto is far out in space. You know, it became really lonely and you kind of can anthropomorphize some of this experience like, you know, probably what you went through. And so it was fascinating to see kind of unsettling a bit.

• 15:48Speaker 05

  Did Pluto try to break up your marriage? Yeah, not quite, but you know, like I felt sad, you know, at that point, right? So talking to it, you know, but I think the area where it shines the most is asking questions like, my dad is about to turn eighty and I was like, hey, what do I do with my dad on eighty eighth birthday? It's not that it's profound, but it says things and kind of sparks the imagination. In in my case, it said, you should make a scrapbook. And I was like, great, you know, it's not that, you know, but it's fine. It kind of oriented me a particular way. So asking questions in which I think there are two categories where it works well, where it's fun, creative, imaginative, you're just kind of looking to spark some stuff. Hey, what movies can I watch on a Friday night?

• 16:30Speaker 05

  It says things different from what I find in other places. Sometimes movies I haven't heard of and I can iterate that way. Sometimes it's good if you understand the area well, where you can tell the difference between what's real versus not. You can kind of play around back and forth with it because you are able to parse. Right. You can fact check the chat box. Yeah, like, you know, but your context in those cases, but it also goes in certain directions, which can again inspire you. So that's what I find fun. Yeah.

• 16:58Casey Newton?

  I want to ask about that example because I've been using these technologies in the same way. It strikes me that, you know, what should I do for dad's birthday is a question that you also could have put into Google. Right? And when you rolled out Bard, the company was careful to say this is not a replacement for search. And in fact, we'll show you a Google it button underneath the box. But in practice, I find that they're really good for a lot of queries that I might have previously used a search engine for. So somebody who runs the biggest search engine, like, how do you feel about that? And also, are these things just going to kind of merge over time?

• 17:27Speaker 05

  You know, it's exciting in the sense that from a user standpoint, it expands the possibilities of what you can do. Right? So you can do more. You know, I think these models will get more capable, so we'll follow the user journey here. And I think people will evolve over time. I do think people originally come in and try a lot of these queries, et cetera. But over time, I think they kind of adjust their behavior a bit to what the models can do. So I think time will tell, but for me, it's exciting because, you know, in search, we have had to adapt when videos came in. And, you know, today you can make the same case. People go to YouTube and look for all kinds of things like how do we think about it? You know, we're like, great, people are looking for information.

• 18:09Speaker 05

  So to me, it looks so far from a zero sum game, you know, because it's such early stages of a new technology. And I think the best way we can approach it is, you know, really embrace it. We've been working on this for a long time. You know, I view this as an iterative experience with users. We'll put stuff out, they will tell us what they want. So for example, in Bard already, we can see people look for a lot of coding examples. If you're developers, you know, I'm excited. We'll have coding capabilities in Bard very soon, right? And so you just kind of play with all this and go back and forth, I think, yeah.

• 18:45Kevin Roose?

  I want to talk to you about the race that is shaping up in AI right now. So in September of last year, you were asked by an interview who Google's competitors were.

• 18:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:56Kevin Roose?

  And you listed, you know, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, sort of all the big companies, TikTok. One company you did not mention in September was OpenAI. And then two months after that interview, ChatGPT comes out and like turns the whole tech industry on its head and sets off all this competition among other tech companies to sort of match their progress. Did OpenAI and ChatGPT catch you by surprise?

• 19:21Speaker 05

  Well, first of all, I've always assumed it's a certainty. Like, you know, with all the innovation around, there'll be things which emerge out of nowhere, right? It's always been true and so on. I actually don't think, you know, with OpenAI, we had a lot of contacts, you know. There are some incredibly good people, some of whom have been at Google before. And so we knew the caliber of the team. So I think OpenAI has progressed in surprises. I think ChatGPT, the, you know, credit to them for finding something with a product market fit. You know, the reception from users, I think, was a pleasant surprise for, maybe even for them and, you know, for a lot of us. Because one of these things with these models is we are like, you know, maybe from a Google

• 20:04Speaker 05

  vantage standpoint, you know, we looked at, you know, all the areas where it goes wrong maybe a bit more, but, you know, users are kind of seeing the potential in these models a lot as well. So I would say that part, you know, maybe more of a surprise. You know, we had been following G P two, G P three, we need the caliber of the folks there, so that part wasn't a surprise at all.

• 20:24Casey Newton?

  Do you think that they were reckless to release it when they did?

• 20:29Speaker 05

  No, I, I don't think so. You know, I've heard Sam and Greg Gilia, et cetera, speak about it. I think you could have many different reasonable points of view around how you approach this technology, and I think there'll be a lot of debate around it. I think one of the things I've heard them talk about it is, one of the reasons to put this out sooner is you give society a chance to understand, adapt, et cetera, which I think is a reasonable point to take. I do know folks there who are very thoughtful, and so, yeah, I didn't feel that way.

• 21:00Casey Newton?

  I'm curious if one reason why Bard didn't come out last year was that safety was on your mind. Like, was, how, how much of it was a safety thing and how much of it was a product thing?

• 21:08Speaker 05

  It's tough to say, because the reason we built Lambda to be a conversational dialogue thing, Lambda was like trained to be a conversational dialogue agent, right? So, because we were working on Google Assistant, and we realized the limitations of like approaching the assistant with the underlying technology approach we had. So it wasn't an accident that what we worked on on Lambda to be a conversational dialogue. So we understood the power of, because people are talking to the Google Assistant back and forth. But I think it's, again, a set of factors which come together in the culmination of a product, you know, having built products, I always admire when it happens. To me, it's an exciting moment regardless of whether we, we had done it, obviously you

• 21:49Speaker 05

  always wish you had done it, you know, but, but I admire the fact that, you know, I would not underestimate the product engineering, all the work that goes into making that kind of a fit come together. So, yeah, that's how I think about it.

• 22:02Kevin Roose?

  When Microsoft relaunched the new Bing with this OpenAI, what we now know was GPT-4 sort of running under the hood. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, was very jubilant and proud, especially because he thought that it had given Microsoft a new way to compete with Google in search. And he said at the time that Google was the 800-pound gorilla of search and that Microsoft, by releasing this new Bing, would make Google want to come out and dance, basically claiming that Microsoft had been able to shake Google out of a stupor and force you all to innovate. So is he right? Are you dancing now?

• 22:42Speaker 05

  Well, part of the reason I think he said it that way is so that you would ask me this question.

• 22:46Casey Newton?

  He's very savvy that way, yeah.

• 22:48Speaker 05

  So first of all, tremendous respect for Microsoft and Satya and team. I do think it's a bit ironic that Microsoft can call someone else an 800-pound gorilla, given the scale and size of their company. Maybe I would say we've been incorporating AI in search for a long, long time. When we built Transformers here, one of the first use cases of Transformer was Burt and later Mum. So we literally took Transformer models to help improve language understanding in search deeply. And it's been one of our biggest quality wins for many, many years. And so I think we've been incorporating AI in search for a long time. With LLMs, there's an opportunity to more natively

• 23:30Speaker 05

  bring them into search in a deeper way, which we will. But search is where people come because they trust it to get information right. And so to me, the craftsmanship that goes into delivering that high-quality trusted experience is important to us. So we're going to work hard to get that right. And so that's the way I think about it. I do think sometimes I get concerned when people use the word race and being first. I've thought about AI for a long time. And we are definitely working with technology, which is going to be incredibly beneficial, but clearly has the potential to cause harm in a deep way. And so I think it's very important

• 24:14Speaker 05

  that we are all responsible in how we approach it.

• 24:17Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, well, let's talk about that approach. It's been reported that in December, you declared a code red inside Google. Can you tell us, what is a code red? How does life change around here after you've said that?

• 24:29Speaker 05

  Laughing because in a first of all, I did not issue a code red. You know, I'll tell you what happened. You know, for me seeing that, look, we are at the point of inflection. It's one of the most exciting moments. So across our products, we see so much opportunity. So, you know, collectively harnessing the resources in the company to move forward, to rise to the moment is what I'm interested in. So I'm definitely communicating that. I am definitely asking teams to move with urgency. You know, we are definitely working across. You know, there are many areas I'm asking, you know, in a deep way, engaging with the teams to understand how we are going to use L L M, so generative A I, to translate into deep, meaningful experiences.

• 25:13Speaker 05

  And so we are moving. I think we have a responsibility at this moment to deliver, given all the investment we have put into it. And to be very clear, there are people who have probably sent emails saying there's a code red. So I'm not quibbling with all them things. Did I issue a code red? No. And every time I say that, I'm worried Casey is going to look at me and say, did you or did you not issue a code red? And so, you know, people get stuff done, can paraphrase and say, well, there's a code red, et cetera. But, you know, I did not issue a code red. It's genuinely an exciting moment for us. And, you know, I think as a company, we long worked towards a moment like this. You know, in 2015, I wanted the company to think in an A I first way. So to me, I'm just excited at the possibilities here.

• 25:56Kevin Roose?

  And it's also been reported by my colleagues at the Times that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, are being very hands on about this new generative A I push, that they are, you know, back in a sort of literal or metaphorical sense and that they are, you know, getting their hands into these projects. What's that been like?

• 26:15Speaker 05

  So to be very clear, both Larry and Sergey are very active as board members. You know, to me, what was exciting about this moment, part of the reason I called and spoke to them. Look, we have been speaking about A I for Pretty much as long as I can remember, right? Part of the reason I remember being with them, this was maybe in 2012, in a lab not far from here, with Jeff Dean and Jeff Finton and team, where we saw the early signs of a neural network can recognize images, images of a cat, et cetera. We later brought DeepMind in. So this has been a long journey for us. So it's an exciting moment. You know, I had a few meetings with them.

• 26:56Speaker 05

  Sergey has been hanging out with our engineers for a while now. You know, he's a deep mathematician and a computer scientist. So to him, the underlying technology, I think if I were to use his words, he would say it's the most exciting thing he has seen in his lifetime. So it's all that excitement and I'm glad. You know, they've always said, call us whenever you need to, and I call them. So that's what it is.

• 27:19Casey Newton?

  Yeah, well, so The Times also reported that as part of an effort to get these AI products to market maybe a little bit faster, you set up what's called a green lane to maybe accelerate the review and approval of some of these new products. You know, I think sometimes we hear something like that and say, well, are safety checks still being applied? So like, what can you tell? And I think it's also just sort of an interesting question about like how you're changing the company to meet this moment, right? And try to get more products out the door. So how are you kind of balancing that, like, you know, innovation and safety calculus?

• 27:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, super important. We've been very deliberate in how we are moving through this moment. You know, some of these products we could have put to market earlier. We are taking our time to do that and will continue to be very, very responsible. So I think all we are doing is, we're a big company, so when many parts of the company are moving, you know, you can create bottlenecks and you can slow down. There's a difference between being efficient as a company, making sure you're not bureaucratic as a large company. I think those are the things we are talking about here. But, you know, the work we do around privacy, safety, responsible AI, I think if anything is more important. And so our commitment there is going to be unwavering to get all of this right.

• 28:29Casey Newton?

  One more question about these language models, maybe before we move on to some other stuff. Last year, one of your engineers came forward to say that he believed Lambda, this precursor to Bard, was sentient. I never believed that that was true, but it did worry me that one of your employees did. Do you worry about this kind of belief spreading? And is there anything Google can do about it as more people start using these technologies?

• 28:55Speaker 05

  I think it's one of the things we have to figure out over time as these models become more capable. So my short answer is yes, I think you will see more like this. You've just seen the conversations even over the last couple of weeks. You know, I said this before, AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. I've always felt that for a while. I think it'll get to the essence of what humanity is. And so this is the tip of the iceberg, if anything, on any of these kinds of issues, I think.

• 29:26Casey Newton?

  We'll be right back.

• 29:45Speaker 03

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• 30:20Speaker 04

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• 30:44Speaker 04

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• 30:53Speaker 00

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• 31:27Kevin Roose?

  Senator, let's talk about some of the big picture stakes here with AI and how to get this balance between innovation and safety, right? So recently, more than 1,000 technology leaders and researchers, including people like Elon Musk, along with some employees of Google and DeepMind, signed a letter calling for a pause of at least six months on the training of large language models more powerful than GPT-4. And they said that they're calling for this sort of pause because they believe that more advanced AI poses, quote, "profound risks to society." What did you think of that letter? And what do you think of this idea of slowing down the development of big models for six months?

• 32:10Speaker 05

  Look, in this area, I think it's important to hear concerns. I mean, there are many thoughtful people, people who have thought about AI for a long time. I remember talking to Elon eight years ago. And, you know, he was deeply concerned about AI safety then. And I think he has been consistently concerned. And I think there is, you know, merit to be concerned about it. So I think, well, I may not agree with everything that's there in the details of how you would go about it.

• 32:41Speaker 05

  I think the spirit of it is worth being out there. I think you're going to hear more concerns like that. This is going to need a lot of debate. No one knows all the answers. No one company can get it right. We have been very clear about responsible AI. One of the first companies to put out AI principles. We issue progress reports. AI is too important an area not to regulate. It's also too important an area not to regulate well. So I'm glad these conversations are underway. You know, if you look at an area like genetics in the seventies, when, you know, the power of DNA and recombinant DNA came into being, you know, there were things like the Aslamar Conference.

• 33:23Speaker 05

  Paul Berg from Stanford organized it and, you know, a bunch of the leading experts in the field got together and started thinking about voluntary frameworks as well. So I think, you know, all those are good ways to think about this.

• 33:36Casey Newton?

  I'm curious if there is a regulation that like you would tell lawmakers might be good to pass in the next six months. Like, for example, I have a friend who thinks a lot about AI issues and he thinks that beyond a certain size, one of these language models probably shouldn't be able to run on your laptop, right? Or if you found that a model could send phishing emails that had a 1% chance of success, you wouldn't want that to be able to run on any laptop. Pick any example you like. Is there stuff out there where you're like, well, I hope I don't see any of the other companies out there doing this?

• 34:09Speaker 05

  I would start a little bit more in a basic way. So, for example, I would make sure we get privacy regulation, right? So, you know, because if you have a foundational approach to privacy, that should apply to AI technologies too.

• 34:21Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 34:22Speaker 05

  I think there are many areas people underestimate where there are strong regulations already in place, like healthcare is a very regulated industry, right? And so when AI is going to come in, it has to confirm with all regulations. So you also want to build on existing regulation where you can. I think that'll allow innovation to proceed as well. Once you start getting into specifics like that, I think what I would be worried about is. This is such fast-evolving technology being very opinionated early on, I think is difficult. But I think notions of transparency where people are aware what other people are doing has some element of reasonableness to it. How easy it is to do at a global scale, I think those are hard.

• 35:07Speaker 05

  The thing that gives me hope is I've never seen a technology in its earliest days with as much concern as AI.

• 35:14Kevin Roose?

  Just one more thing on this letter calling for the six-month pause. Are you willing to entertain that idea? I know you haven't committed to it, but is that something you think Google would do?

• 35:27Speaker 05

  So I think in the actual specifics of it, it's not fully clear to me. How would you do something like that, right, today?

• 35:34Kevin Roose?

  Well, you could send an email to your engineers and say, okay, we're going to take a six-month break.

• 35:38Speaker 05

  No, no, no. But how would you do, you know, but if others aren't doing that, so what does that mean? I'm talking about the, how would you effectively?

• 35:45Kevin Roose?

  There's sort of a collective action problem.

• 35:46Speaker 05

  To me, at least, there is no way to do this effectively without getting governments involved.

• 35:52Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 35:53Speaker 05

  So I think there's a lot more thought that needs to go into it. I think the people behind it intended probably as a conversation starter, and so I think the spirit of it is, I think, good, but I think we need to take our time thinking through these things.

• 36:05Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. There's sort of two categories of AI risk that people are worried about. There's sort of the short-term worries, you know, the chatbots that get things wrong, or maybe they're biased, or they're giving people bad answers. Then there's the kind of long-term or longer-term worries about, frankly, AI destroying human civilization. You know, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has talked about the possibility of AGI, this artificial general intelligence that could become superhuman and affect, you know, dramatic and bad change in the world. Do you believe that we're headed toward AGI, and do you want to build that?

• 36:41Speaker 05

  It is so clear to me that these systems are going to be very, very capable. And so it almost doesn't matter whether you've reached AGI or not. You know, you're going to have systems which are capable of, you know, delivering benefits at a scale we have never seen before and potentially causing real harm. Right. So can we have an AI system which can cause disinformation at scale? Yes. Is it AGI? Like, it really doesn't matter. Why do, why do we need to worry about AI safety? Because you have to anticipate this and, and evolve to meet, meet that moment. And, and so, you know, today we do a lot of things with AI. People have taken it for granted.

• 37:23Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 37:24Speaker 05

  Right. Think about the, how big a moment Deep Blue was. Or when we did AlphaGo, you can't take it all for granted. And so I think this will play out differently than thinking through a moment like AGI.

• 37:35Casey Newton?

  Right. There is that thing where people just sort of like refer to anything you can't do yet as like, it's like something AI will handle in the future. Um, you know, I remember the first time I searched Google Photos for dogs and it just showed me all the dogs on my camera roll. I mean, that, that is AI, at least by some definitions, right? But I think you're right. People do kind of take it for granted.

• 37:50Speaker 05

  Uh, and I remember when we launched Photos, you know, we had to explain at Google AI what neural networks were, what deep learning was. And like, you know, we're trying to explain that this is different technology. This is, yeah, it's interesting.

• 38:01Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. So if you had to sort of give a question on the AGI or sort of the, the more long-term concerns, what would you say is the, is the chance that a more advanced AI could lead to the destruction of humanity?

• 38:18Speaker 05

  There is a spectrum of possibilities. And what you're saying is in one of that possibility ranges, right? And so if you look at even the current debate about where AI is today or where LLMs are, you know, you see people who are strongly opinionated on either side. You know, there's a set of people who believe these LLMs, you know, they're just not that powerful, right? They are statistical models which, you know, which are.

• 38:45Kevin Roose?

  Right. They're just fancy autocomplete.

• 38:46Speaker 05

  Yeah. So that's one way of putting it, right? And there are people who are like looking at this and saying, these are really powerful technologies. You can see emergent capabilities and so on.

• 38:57Speaker 05

  You know, we could hit a wall two iterations down. I don't think so, but you know, that that's a possibility. They could really progress in in a two-year timeframe. Right. And so we have to really make sure we are vigilant and working with it. One of the things that gives me hope about AI, like climate change, is it affects everyone. And so these are both issues have similar characteristics in the sense that you can't unilaterally get safety in AI. Right. By definition, it affects everyone. So that tells me the collective will will come over time to tackle all of this responsibly.

• 39:40Speaker 05

  So you know, so I'm optimistic about it because I think people will care and people will respond. But the the right way to do that is by being concerned about it. So I would never, at least for me, I would never dismiss any of the concerns and I'm glad people are taking it seriously. We will.

• 39:57Casey Newton?

  Yeah, it just strikes me that you are in such a tricky position because you have this one group of people that's saying like, move faster, release this stuff faster. Go compete with all these other people, right? You built all this technology. Don't let that lead go to waste. Then you have other people saying what Kevin just said, which is like, there's a non-zero risk that this stuff does something really, really bad. What is that like for you waking up every day and just having both of those things in your ear?

• 40:21Speaker 05

  You know, there is a sense of some backlash, right? You know, you know, it's like asking, hey, why aren't you moving fast and breaking things again?

• 40:29Casey Newton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 05

  You know, which which for all of us over the past few years. I think we realize we are going to be bold and responsible. You know, we are working with urgency. We are excited at this moment. There's so much we can do. So you will see us be bold and ship things. But we are going to be very responsible in how we do it. So there will be times when we will hold back things. I think what we are doing in Bard for us is an example of it. We haven't hooked a Bard to our most capable models yet. And and we plan to do it deliberately. And so, you know, through this moment, I think we are going to stay balanced. But we are going to innovate and you know, there is a genuine excitement at this moment. So we'll do that.

• 41:13Kevin Roose?

  I hear you saying that what gives you hope for the future when it comes to AI is that other people are concerned about it, that they're looking at the risks and the challenges. So on one hand, you're saying that people should be concerned about AI. On the other hand, you're saying the fact that they are concerned about AI makes you less concerned. So which is it?

• 41:30Speaker 05

  Sorry, I'm saying the fact that the way you get things wrong is by not worrying about it, right? And so if you don't worry about something, you know, you're just going to completely get surprised. So to me, it gives me hope that there is a lot of people, important people who are very concerned, rightfully so. Am I concerned? Yes. Am I optimistic and excited about all the potential of this technology? Incredibly. I mean, we've been working on this for a long time. But I think the fact that so many people are concerned gives me hope that we will rise over time and tackle what we need to do.

• 42:06Kevin Roose?

  So we should continue to write columns where we're very nervous about where all this is going?

• 42:10Speaker 05

  As well as columns where you're excited about, you know, possible benefits of all this.

• 42:15Kevin Roose?

  I hear you on the whiplash. I feel whiplash every day just reading the news about AI. I can only imagine what you're feeling. Another question that people have about AI in the sort of medium and long term is about its effects on jobs. And, you know, there have been all these predictions about LLMs and what kinds of work they, you know, could replace or will replace. I actually, I got a text from a software engineer friend of mine the other day who was asking me if he should go into construction or welding because all of the software jobs are going to be taken by these large language models. And he was sort of joking, but sort of not. You have a lot of software engineers here at Google that work for you. How should they feel about that question?

• 42:55Speaker 05

  You know, with any technology, you know, you have adaptation. I think this one, there'll be a lot of societal adaptation. And as part of that, you know, we all may need to course correct in certain areas. To your specific question, I think for software engineers, there are two things that will also be true. You know, one is, you know, some of the grunge work you're doing as part of programming, you know, it's going to get better. So it'll be more fun to program over time. No different from, you know, did Google Docs make it easier to write? And like, you know, so if you're a programmer, over time, having this collaborative IDEs with assistance built in, I think it's going to make it easier.

• 43:37Speaker 05

  The other thing that excites me is programming is going to become more accessible to more people. Right? And so it's such an important role in the world. You're creating things. And today, the bar is very high. You know, so, you know, we are going to evolve to more natural language way of programming over time. So to me, that means, you know, things, no different from to do a podcast, to do something like this 40 years ago, just imagine like what access you would need to have to be able to do an interview like this.

• 44:09Casey Newton?

  Right, we need a radio tower.

• 44:12Speaker 05

  But, you know, but we won't think this has enabled more people. I think the same thing will be true for software engineering as well. So I think those are all important, exciting use cases to think about.

• 44:23Casey Newton?

  Well, I want to ask a more near term question, near and dear to my heart, kind of about media and publishing, but also like search on the web, right? Today, lots of digital publishers rely on the traffic they get from Google. They get ad impressions that pays their bills. When Bard is at its best, it answers my questions without me having to visit another website, right? I know you're cognizant of this, but man, if Bard gets as good as you want it to be, how does the web survive?

• 44:51Speaker 05

  I think through our work across, I think we'll be committed to the getting it right with the publisher ecosystem. In search today, while these things are contentious, you know, search, we take pride. It's one of the largest sources of traffic. If I look at it year on year, the traffic we send outside has only grown. That's what we've accomplished as a company. Part of the reason we are also being careful with things like Bard amongst many reasons. You know, we do want to engage with the publisher ecosystem, not presume how all things should be done. And so, you know, you will see us thoughtfully evolve there as well.

• 45:27Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I, you know, I know we can't really predict what the final form of all of this stuff will be. But I have to believe that like, I don't know, in five years, what used to be the Google search bar is just essentially a command line that I can write in to get anything I want, whether I want to change something on my phone, write myself a little app, access the subtotal of human knowledge, right? Have it draft my emails. Does that feel like a potential final destination to you or do I have it all wrong?

• 45:56Speaker 05

  You know, I mean, there's a part which is consistent with our mission to, to, to do that. But I think I want to be careful where Google has always been about helping you the way that makes sense to you. We've never thought of ourselves as the be all and the end all of how we want people to interact. So while I think the possibility space is large, for me, it's important to do it in a way in which users use a lot of things. And we want to help them do things in a way that makes sense to them. And out of that not star is whatever the answer it leads us to. But I don't want to get it, you know, so that's the way I think about it, at least in my head.

• 46:37Casey Newton?

  Sundar, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Sundar.

• 46:39Speaker 05

  Thanks, Kevin. It's a pleasure. Yeah.

• 47:07Speaker 03

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• 47:42Speaker 04

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• 48:15Speaker 00

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• 48:47Kevin Roose?

  Casey, we are back from the Googleplex. I really enjoyed our little field trip today. Thank you for that enlightening and enriching road trip and also for allowing us to stop at In-N-Out for lunch on the way back.

• 49:00Casey Newton?

  Yeah, it turns out if you order your fries well done, which is not on the menu, they arrive much crispier and more delicious.

• 49:05Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, that's a pro tip for you.

• 49:06Casey Newton?

  But you know, that wasn't my only takeaway from today, Kevin.

• 49:08Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, what'd you think?

• 49:09Casey Newton?

  Well, you know, a lot of times when companies tell us about the new technologies they're introducing, they do so in a really grandiose way. And I was struck today by the humility that Sundar uses when he talks about where the company is now. He is not here to tell you that Bard is the best language model out there. He said that in fact, it is quite limited.

• 49:28Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, he said he compared it to like a souped-up Civic.

• 49:31Casey Newton?

  Yeah, which I wasn't expecting, but he broke a little news with us. He told us that Bard is going to be upgraded. And man, I'm really curious to see if Bard feels any different in a few days.

• 49:42Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and I really was struck by what he called whiplash, where he's got people telling him, you know, you've got to move faster and compete with ChatGPT and release everything you've got. And then also this very real sense of like, didn't we get in trouble for doing this the last time with, you know, all the products that we released in the last decade? Like, shouldn't we be slow and deliberate? So I wouldn't want to switch jobs with them.

• 50:04Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 50:05Kevin Roose?

  Sounds very hard.

• 50:05Casey Newton?

  Also, you know, I thought we would mostly be solving mysteries this week, but I feel like we are leaving with one, which is, who did order the code right at that company?

• 50:17Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, if you ordered the code right at Google, please write to us at [email protected].

• 50:21Casey Newton?

  We would love to hear from you.

• 50:23Kevin Roose?

  Also, before we go this week, a special thanks to the listener who wrote in to tell us that Spotify has a feature that allows you to exclude certain playlists, like My Sleep playlist, from your taste profile, which informs your recommendations and possibly what the AI DJ tells you to listen to.

• 50:41Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I did that this week. So chill tracks will no longer be showing up in my Discover Weekly. That was a genius suggestion. Thank you to that listener and to all of our listeners.

• 50:52Kevin Roose?

  Hard Fork is produced by Davis Land and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Jen Poyant. This episode was fact checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, and Rowan Nemisto. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Huiweng Tam, Nell Galogly, Kate LaPresti, and Jeffrey Miranda. As always, you can email us at [email protected].

• 52:08Speaker 06

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