they wondered if there was a better way

to find information on the web on

September 15th 1997 they registered

Google as a website one of the greatest

entrepreneurs of our times someone who

really wanted to think outside the box

if that sounds like it's impossible

let's try it he took a backseat in

recent years to other Google leaders

Brin is now back helping Google's

efforts in artificial intelligence I

feel lucky uh that I fell into doing

something um that I feel really matter

you know getting people

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

[Applause]

information no introduction needed

welcome I I just agreed to this last

minute as you know I don't know where

you pulled up that clip so fast you guys

team is amazing kind of amazing this is

kind of amazing yeah

I thought Serge Ser just well he asked

to come check out the conference and I

was like definitely like come hang out I

didn't actually understand to be

perfectly honest I thought you guys just

kind of had a podcast and like a little

get together or something but yeah this

kind of mind-blowing congratulations

thank you well I'm glad you came out I'm

feeling a little bit shy but yeah wow

but thanks for agreeing to chat for a

little bit we're going to talk for a

little bit so this was not on the

schedule um but uh I thought it'd be

great to talk to you given where you sit

in the world as AI is on the brink of

and is actively changing the world

obviously um you know you founded Google

with Larry in 1998 and um you know

recently it's been reported that you've

kind of spent a lot more time at Google

working on AI I thought maybe and and a

lot of Industry analysts and pundits

have been kind of arguing that llms and

conversational AI tools are kind of an

ex Potential Threat to Google search

that's that's one of the and I think a

lot of those people don't build

businesses or they have competitive

Investments but you know we'll leave

that to the side um but there's this big

kind of narrative on what's going to

happen to Google and and where's Google

sitting with AI and I know you're

spending a lot of time on it so thanks

for coming to talk about it how much

time are you spending at Google what are

you working on yeah um honestly like

pretty much every day I mean like I'm

missing today which is you know one of

the one of the reasons I was a little

reluctant but I'm glad I came um but

I think as a computer

scientist I've never seen anything as

exciting as all of the AI progress

that's happened the last few

years thanks um no but it's it's kind of

mindblowing when I went to grad school

in the 9s you know AI was like kind of

like a footnote in the curriculum almost

like you like oh maybe you have to do

this one little test on AI we tried all

these different things they don't really

work that's it that's all you need to

know um and then somehow miraculously

all these people who are working on

neural Nets which was one of the big

discarded uh approaches to AI in like

the' 60s 7s and so forth um just started

to make progress a little bit more

compute a little more data a few clever

algorithms um and the thing that's

happened in this last decade or so is

just amazing as a computer scientist

like every month um you know well all of

you I'm sure use all of the AI tools out

there but like every month there's like

a new amazing capability and I'm like

probably you know doubly wowed as

everybody else is that computers can do

this um and

so yeah for me I really got back into

the technical work um because I just

don't want to miss out on this um as a

computer scientist is an extension of

search or a rewriting of how people

retrieve

information I mean I just think that the

AI touches so many different elements of

day-to-day life and sure search is one

of them uh but it kind of covers

everything um for example programming

itself right like the way that I think

about

it is very different now like you know

writing code from scratch feels really

hard compared to just asking the AI to

do it right um yeah sorry um so what do

you do then um actually I've written a

little bit of code myself just for Just

for kicks just for fun uh and then

sometimes I've had the AI write the code

for me um uh which was which was fun um

I mean just one example I wanted to see

how good our AI models were at Sudoku

so I had the AI model itself write a

bunch of code that would automatically

generate Sudoku puzzles and then feed

them to the AI itself and then score it

and so forth right um but it could just

write that code and I was like talking

to the engineers about it and you know

whatever we had some debate back and

forth like I came back half an hour

later it's done and they they were kind

of impressed because they don't honestly

use the AI tools for their own coding as

much as I think they ought to right um

so that's interesting example because

maybe there's a model that does Sudoku

really well maybe there's a model that

like answers information questions for

me about facts on the in the world maybe

there's an AI model that designs houses

um a lot of people are working towards

these ginormous general purpose llms is

that where the world goes some people I

think refer I don't know who wrote this

recently said there's a God model like

there's going to be a god model and

that's why everyone's investing so much

is if you can build the god model

you're done you got AGI whatever terms

you want to use there's this one thing

to rule them all or is the reality of AI

that there are lots of smaller models

that do application specific things

maybe work together like in an agent

system like what's the what what what is

the evolution of model development and

the how models are ultimately used to do

all these cool things um yeah I mean I

think like if you looked 10 15 years ago

there were different AI techniques that

were used for different problems

altogether like uh you know the chess

playing AI was very different than image

generation which was you know very

different um than like recently the

graph neural net at Google that like

outperformed every physics forecasting

model I don't know if you know this but

you guys publish this pretty aesome

embarassed I but it was like a totally

different Arch it was a different system

it was trained differently and it ended

up in that particular so there

historically there have been different

systems and even recently um like the

international math Olympiad that we

participated in we got um silver metal

as an AI actually one point away from

gold um but we actually had three

different AI models in there there was

one very uh formal theorem proving model

that actually did basically the best

there was one uh specific to Geometry

problems believe it or not that was just

a special kind of AI uh and then there

was a general purpose language model

um but uh since then we've tried to take

the learnings from that that was just a

couple months ago uh and triy to infuse

some of the sort of knowledge and

ability from the formal prover into our

general language models um that's still

working progress but I do think the

trend is to have a more unified model I

don't know if I'd call a god model uh

but to have certainly sort of shared

architectures and and ultimately even

shared

models um right so if that's true you

need a lot of compute to train and

develop that model that big

model uh yeah yeah I mean you definitely

need a lot of compute I I think like

I've I've read

some articles out there that just like

extrapolate they're like you know it's

like 100 megawatt and a gwatt and 10

gwatt and 100 gwatt and I don't know if

I'm quite a believer in you know that

level of

extrapolation um partly because

also the algorithmic improvements that

have come over the course of the last

few years uh maybe are actually even

outpacing the increased compute that's

put into these

models so is it irrational the buildout

that's happening everyone talking about

the Nvidia Revenue the Nvidia profit the

Nvidia market cap supporting all of what

people call the hyperscalers and the

growth of the infrastructure needed to

build these very large scale models

using the techniques of today is this

irrational or is it rational because if

it works it's so big that it doesn't

matter how much you well first of all

I'm not like an economist or like a

market Watcher the way that you guys

very carefully um watch companies so I

just want to disclaim my abilities in

the space um I think that I know uh for

us we're kind of building out compute as

quickly as we can and we just have a

huge amount of demand I mean for example

our Cloud customers just want a huge

amount of tpus gpus you name it um you

know we just can't we have to turn down

customers uh because we just don't have

the compute available uh and we use it

internally to train our own models to

serve our own models and so forth

so I guess I think there are very good

reasons that companies are currently

building out comput at a fast pace um I

just don't know that I would look at the

training Trends and extrapolate three

orders of magnitude ahe just blindly

from where we are today but the

Enterprise demand is there out there you

know I mean they they want to do lots of

other things for example running

inference on all these AI models

applying them to all these um new

applications um yeah there doesn't seem

to

be uh a limit right now

and where have you seen the greatest

success surprising success in the

application of models whether it's in

robotics or biology what are you like

seeing that you're like wow this is

really working and where are things

going to be more challenging and take

longer than I think some people might be

expecting um yeah I mean uh now that you

mentioned those well I I would say in

biology you know we've had Alpha fold

for quite a while um and I'm not

personally a biologist but when I talk

to biologists out there like everybody

uses it and it's more recent uh variants

um uh and that is I guess a different

kind of AI but like I said I do think

all these things tend to

converge um you know

robotics for the most part I see in this

sort of wow stage like wow you could

make a robot do that with just you know

this general purpose language model or

just a little bit of fine tuning this

way or that and it's like

amazing uh but maybe

not for the most part yet at the level

of robustness that would make it like

day-to-day useful but you see a line of

sight to

it

um yeah yeah I mean it would be it's I

don't see any particular Google the

robotics business and then spun it out

or sold it we've had like had aot five

or six robotics businesses they just

weren't the timing wasn't right yeah um

yeah unfortunately I don't know I guess

yeah I think that was just a little too

early to be perfectly honest I mean

there was like Boston Dynamics um what

was called um start stamp I don't even

remember all the ones we had anyway

we've had like five or six

embarrassingly yeah um but they're very

cool um and they very

impressive

um it yeah it just feels kind of silly

having done all of that

work uh and seeing now how capable these

General language models are that include

for example vision and image and they

multimodal and they can understand the

scene and everything and not having had

that at the time uh yeah it just feels

like you were sort of on a treadmill

that wasn't going to get anywhere

without the modern AI technology you

spend a lot of time on core technology

do you also spend a lot of time on

product visioning where things going and

what like the human computer interaction

modalities are going to be in the future

in a world of AI everywhere like what's

our life going to be like I mean I guess

there's water cooler chitchat about

things like

that um sh care to share

any

I um trying to think of things that

aren't embarrassing um struggling but uh

friends I I guess it's like just really

hard

to you know just forecast like you know

to think five years out because you know

based on the base technical capability

of the AI is what enables the

applications um and then sometimes you

know somebody will just whip up a little

demo that you just didn't think

about

um and it'll be kind of mind-blowing

yeah um uh and uh and of course then

from demo to actually making it real in

production so forth takes time um I

don't know if you've played with like uh

the Astra model but it's just sort of

live video and audio and you can chat

with the AI about what's going on in

your environment you'll give me access

right uh yeah I'll get well once I have

access um I mean I'm I'm sort of

sometimes the slowest to get some of

these

things um but it's um yeah there's like

a moment of wow

uh and you're like oh my God this is

amazing and then you're like okay well

it does a correctly like 90% of the time

but am I really like is that then worth

it if 10% of the time it's kind to make

a mistake or taking too long or

whatever and then you have to work work

work work work work work to get to

Perfect all those things make it

responsive make it available whatever

and then you actually end up with

something kind of amazing I heard a

story

that you went in you were on site I

should have mentioned this to you before

you came on stage see if you were cool

about talking about here we are um and

there like a bunch of Engineers showed

you that you could like use AI to write

code and it was like well we haven't

pushed it in Gemini yet um because we

want to make sure it doesn't make

mistakes and there was this like

hesitation culturally at Google to do

that and you were like no if it writes

code push it and you really and a lot of

people have told me this story because

they said and um or you know I've heard

this that it was really important to

hear that from you the founder in being

really clear that Google's conservatism

you know can't rule the day today and we

need to kind of see Google push the

envelope is that accurate is that kind

of huh how you've spent some time or I

don't remember the specific in just to

be honest but uh but I'm not

surprised um I mean I guess that's the

question for me is like as Google's

gotten so big there's more to lose

I think there's like this um yeah I

think there's a little bit of fearful I

mean language models to begin with like

we invented them basically with a

Transformer paper that was um whatever

six eight years ago something like that

um and uh oh no one by the way is back

at Google now which is awesome Cong um

and um yeah we were we were too timid uh

to deploy them um and you know for a lot

of good reasons like whatever they some

make mist mistakes they say embarrassing

things whatever you know um they're you

know sometimes they're just like kind of

embarrassing how dumb they are even

today's like latest and greatest things

like make really stupid mistakes people

would never make um and at the same

time like they're incredibly powerful

and they can help you do things you

never would have done and um you know

like I've like programmed really

complicated things with my kid like

they'll just program it because they

just ask the AI using all these really

complicated apis and all kinds of things

that would take like a month to like

learn so I just think that that

capability is

Magic

and uh you need to be willing to have

some

embarrassments uh and take some risks

and um and I think we've gotten better

at that and well you guys have probably

seen some more

embarrassments um but you're comfor

I have super voting you're still like I

mean you're comfortable with the

embarrassments at this St it's so to do

this like I mean not not particular on

the basis of my stock but I I um but as

a you know I mean but am I comfortable

um I mean I guess I just think of it is

this something magical we're giving the

world yeah and I think as long as we

communicate it properly like saying like

look this thing is amazing

and we'll periodically get stuff really

wrong uh then I think we should put it

out there and let people experiment and

see what new ways they find to use it um

I just don't think this is the

technology you want to just kind of keep

close to the chest and hidden until it's

like

perfect do you think that there's so

many places that AI can affect the world

and so much value to be created that

it's not really a race between Google

and meta and Amazon like people frame

these things as kind of a race is there

just so much value to be created that

you're working on a lot of different

opportunities and it's not really about

who builds the the model that score the

llm that scores the best that there's so

much more to it I mean how do you kind

of think

about um the world out there and

Google's place in it I mean I I think

it's very

helpful to have competition in the sense

that all these guys are vying and um we

just we were number one for on olysis

for a couple weeks by the way uh just

now and I think we're last time I

checked we're still beat the Top Model

there's just some El stuff so you do

care yeah yeah not

saying not but um uh and uh um and I you

know we've come a long way since um you

know a couple whatever years ago um chat

GPT launched or and we were quite a ways

behind uh I'm really pleased with all

the progress we made so we definitely

pay attention I mean I think it's great

that there are all these AI companies

out there be it uh US Open AI anthropic

um you name it there's um mistol it's

it's a I mean it's a big fast moving

field but I guess your question is yeah

I mean I think there's tremendous

value uh to humanity and I I think if

you think

back uh you know like when I was in

college let's say and there wasn't

really a proper internet or like web the

way that we know it today like the

amount of effort it would take to get

basic information the amount of effort

it would take to communicate with people

you know before cell phones and things

um like we've gained so much

capability uh ac across the world uh but

the sort of the new AI is another big

capability

uh and pretty much everybody in the

world can get access to it in one form

or another these days and I think it's

super exciting it's awesome uh sorry we

have so such limited time Sergey thank

you so much for joining us please join

me in thanking Sergey thank

[Applause]

you thanks yeah