Impact of AI in human history

It was a five-year waiting list, and we got a rotary telephone. But it dramatically changed our lives. People would come to our house to make calls to their loved ones. I would have to go all the way to the hospital to get blood test records and it would take two hours to go and they would say, "Sorry, it's not ready. Come back the next day.", two hours to come back. And that became a five-minute thing. So as a kid, this light bulb went in my head, this power of technology to change people's lives. We had no running water. It was a massive drought, so they would get water in these trucks, maybe eight buckets per household. So me and my brother, sometimes my mom, we would wait in line, get that and bring it back home. Many years later, we had running water and we had a water heater, and you could get hot water to take a shower. For me, everything was discreet like that.

The following is a conversation with Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet on this, the Lex Fridman podcast.

Your life story is inspiring to a lot of people. It's inspiring to me. You grew up in India, whole family living in a humble two-room apartment, very little, almost no access to technology. And from those humble beginnings, you rose to lead a $2 trillion technology company. If you could travel back in time and told that, let's say, twelve-year-old Sundar that you're now leading one of the largest companies in human history, what do you think that young kid would say?

What advice would you give to young folks listening to this all over the world, who look up to you and find your story inspiring, who want to be maybe the next Sundar Pichai, who want to start, create companies, build something that has a lot of impact in the world? You have a lot of luck along the way, but you obviously have to make smart choices, you're thinking about what you want to do, your brain is telling you something. But when you do things, I think it's important to get that... Listen to your heart and see whether you actually enjoy doing it. That feeling of if you love what you do, it's so much easier, and you're going to see the best version of yourself. It's easier said than done. I think it's tough to find things you love doing. But I think listening to your heart a bit more than your mind in terms of figuring out what you want to do, I think is one of the best things I would tell people.

What lessons can we learn? Maybe from an outsider perspective, for me, looking at your story and gotten to know you a bit, you're humble, you're kind. Usually when I think of somebody who has had a journey like yours and climbs to the very top of leadership in a cutthroat world, they're usually going to be a bit of an asshole. What wisdom are we supposed to draw from the fact that your general approach is of balance, of humility, of kindness, listening to everybody. What's your secret? I do get angry. I do get frustrated. I have the same emotions all of us do in the context of work and everything. But a few things: I think I... Over time I figured out the best way to get the most out of people. You find mission-oriented people who are in the shared journey, who have this inner drive to excellence to do the best. You motivate people and you can achieve a lot that way. It often tends to work out that way.

I've gotten a chance to get to know Darren Aronofsky. He's been really leaning in and trying to figure out... It's fun to watch a genius who came up before any of this was even remotely possible. He created Pi, one of my favorite movies. And from there, he just continued to create a really interesting variety of movies. And now he's trying to see how can AI be used to create compelling films. You have people like that. You have people I've gotten just to know, edgier folks, they are AI firsts, like Dor Brothers. Both Aronofsky and Dor Brothers create at the edge of the Overton window society. They push, whether it's sexuality or violence. It's edgy, like artists are, but it's still classy. It doesn't cross that line. Whatever that line is. Hunter S. Thompson has this line, "The only way to find out where the edge, where the line is, is by crossing it." And I think for artists, that's true. That's their purpose sometimes. Comedians and artists just cross that line.

Do you think the scaling laws are holding strong on, there's a lot of ways to describe the scaling laws for AI, but on the pre-training, on post-training fronts, so the flip side of that, do you anticipate AI progress will hit a wall? Is there a wall? It's a cherished micro kitchen conversation, once in a while I have it, like when Demis is visiting or if Demis, Koray, Jeff, Norm, Sergey, a bunch of our people, we sit and talk about this. Look, we see a lot of headroom ahead, I think. We've been able to optimize and improve on all fronts, pre-training, post-training, test time compute, tool use, over time, making these more agentic. So getting these models to be more general world models in that direction.

Another kitchen question. So lots of folks are talking about timelines for AGI or ASI, artificial super intelligence. So AGI loosely defined is basically human expert level at a lot of the main fields of pursuit for humans. And then ASI is what AGI becomes, presumably quickly, by being able to self-improve. So becoming far superior in intelligence across all these disciplines than humans. When do you think we'll have AGI? It's 2030 a possibility? There's one other term we should throw in there. I don't know who used it first, maybe Karpathy did, AJI. Have you heard AJI, the artificial jagged intelligence? Sometimes feels that way, both their progress and you see what they can do and then you can trivially find they make numerical errors or counting R's in strawberry or something, which seems to trip up most models or whatever it is. So maybe we should throw that term in there. I feel like we are in the AJI phase where dramatic progress, some things don't work well, but overall you're seeing lots of progress.

Maybe one more kitchen question. This even further ridiculous concept of p(doom). So the philosophically minded folks in the AI community, think about the probability that AGI and then ASI might destroy all of human civilization. I would say my p(doom) is about 10%. Do you ever think about this kind of long-term threat of ASI and what would your p(doom) be? Look, I mean for sure. Look, I've both been very excited about AI, but I've always felt this is a technology you have to actively think about the risks and work very, very hard to harness it in a way that it all works out well. On the p(doom) question, look, it wouldn't surprise you to say that's probably another micro kitchen conversation that pops up once in a while. And given how powerful the technology is maybe stepping back, when you're running a large organization, if you can align the incentives of the organization, you can achieve pretty much anything. If you can get people all marching towards a goal, in a very focused way, in a mission-driven way, you can pretty much achieve anything.

When you and I hung out last year and took a walk, I don't think we talked about this, but I remember outside of that seeing dozens of articles written by analysts and experts and so on, that Sundar Pichai should step down because the perception was that Google was definitively losing the AI race, has lost its magic touch, in the rapidly evolving technological landscape,. And now a year later, it's crazy. You showed this plot of all the things that were shipped over the past year. It's incredible. And Gemini Pro is winning across many benchmarks and products as we sit here today. So take me through that experience when there's all these articles saying you're the wrong guy to lead Google through this. Google is lost, is done, it's over, to today where Google is winning again. What were some low points during that time? Look, lots to unpack. Obviously, the main bet I made as a CEO was to really make sure the company was approaching everything in a AI-first way, really setting ourselves up to develop AGI responsibly, and make sure we are putting out products which embodies that, things that are very, very useful for people. So look, I knew even through moments like that last year, I had a good sense of what we were building internally. So I'd already made many important decisions bringing together teams of the caliber of Brain and DeepMind and setting up Google DeepMind. There were things like we made the decision to invest in TPUs 10 years ago, so we knew we were scaling up and building big models.

What about the decision to recently add AI mode? So Google Search is, as they say, the front page of the internet, it's like a legendary minimalist thing with 10 blue links. When people think internet, they think that page and now you're starting to mess with that. So the AI mode, which is a separate tab, and then integrating AI in the results, I'm sure there were some battles in meetings on that one. Look, in some ways when mobile came, people wanted answers to more questions, so we are kind of constantly evolving it, but you're right, this moment, that evolution because the underlying technology is becoming much more capable. You can have AI give a lot of context, but one of our important design goals though, is when you come to Google Search, you are going to get a lot of context, but you're going to go and find a lot of things out on the web. So that will be true in AI mode, in AI overviews, and so on.

I have to ask you about Chrome. I have to say, for me personally, Google Chrome is probably, I don't know, I'd like to see where I would rank it, but in this temptation, and this is not a recency bias, although it might be a little bit, but I think it's up there, top three, maybe the number one piece of software for me of all time. It's incredible. It's really incredible. The browser is our window to the web, and Chrome really continues for many years. But even initially, to push the innovation on that front when it was stale, and it continues to challenge. It continues to make it more performant, so efficient, and just innovate constantly, and the Chromium aspect of it.

I have to ask you, on the programming front, AI is getting really good at programming. Gemini, both the agentic and just the LLM has been incredible, so a lot of programmers are really worried that they will lose their jobs. How worried should they be, and how should they adjust so they can be thriving in this new world, or more and more code is written by AI? I think a few things. Looking at Google, we've given various stats around 30% of code now uses AI- generated suggestions or whatever it is. But the most important metric, and we carefully measure it is, like, how much has our engineering velocity increased as a company due to AI, right? It's tough measure, and we rigorously try to measure it, and our estimates are that number is now at 10%, right?

You've revolutionized web browsing. You've revolutionized a lot of things over the years. Android changed the game. It's an incredible operating system. We could talk for hours about Android. What does the future of Android look like? Is it possible it becomes more and more AI-centric, especially now you throw into the mix, Android XR, with being able to do augmented reality, and mixed reality, and virtual reality in the physical world? The best innovations in computing have come through a paradigm IO change, right? When with GUI, and then with a graphical user interface, and then with multi-touch in the context of mobile voice later on. Similarly, I feel like AR is that next paradigm. I think it was held back. Both the system integration challenges of making good AR is very, very hard.

It's a great question. Maybe it's proactive by then and should tell me a few things I should know. But I think if I were to ask it, I think it'll help us understand ourselves much better in a way that'll surprise us, I think. And so maybe that, you already see people do it with the products, but in a AGI context, I think that'll be pretty powerful. On a personal level, or a general human nature?

Look, I think [inaudible 01:48:19] the essence of humanity, there's something about the consciousness we have, what makes us uniquely human, maybe the lines will blur over time. And it's tough to articulate. But I hope, hopefully we live in a world where if you make resources more plentiful and make the world lesser of a zero-sum game over time, which it's not, but in a resource constrained environment, people perceive it to be. And so I hope the values of what makes us uniquely human, empathy, kindness, all that surfaces more is the aspirational hope I have. Yeah, it multiplies the compassion, but also the curiosity, just the banter, the debates we'll have about the meaning of it all. And I also think in the scientific domains, all the incredible work that DeepMind is doing, I think we'll still continue to play, to explore scientific questions, mathematical questions, physics questions, even as AI gets better and better at helping us solve some of the questions. Sometimes the question itself is a really difficult thing.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sundar Pichai. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. Shortly before this conversation, I got a chance to get a couple of demos that frankly blew my mind. The engineering was really impressive. The first demo was Google Beam, and the second demo was the XR glasses. And some of it was caught on video, so I thought I would include here some of those video clips. Hey Lex, my name's Andrew.

How you doing? Good to meet you.

Thank you for this. All right, back to me. Hopefully watching videos of me having my mind blown like the apes in 2001 Space Odyssey playing with a monolith was somewhat interesting. Like I said, I was very impressed. And now I thought, if it's okay, I could make a few additional comments about the episode and just in general. In this conversation with Sundar Pichai, I discussed the concept of the Neolithic package, which is the set of innovations that came along with the first agricultural revolution about 12,000 years ago, which included the formation of social hierarchies, the early primitive forms of government, labor specialization, domestication of plants and animals, early forms of trade, large scale cooperations of humans like that required to build, yes, the pyramids and temples like Göbekli Tepe. I think this may be the right way to actually talk about the inventions that changed human history, not just as a single invention, but as a kind of network of innovations and transformations that came along with it. And the productivity multiplier framework that I mentioned in the episode, I think is a nice way to try to concretize the impact of each of these inventions under consideration. And we have to remember that each node in the network of the fast follow-on inventions is in itself a productivity multiplier. Some are additive, some are multiplicative. So in some sense, the size of the network in the package is the thing that matters when you're trying to rank the impact of inventions on human history. The easy picks for the period of biggest transformation, at least in sort of modern day discourse is the Industrial Revolution, or even in the 20th century, the computer or the internet. I think it's because it's easiest to intuit for modern day humans, the exponential impact of those technologies.