What happens to Google when AI answers everything?

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com/splotify. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability, very 16 plus. LLMs had been in search long before our we had BERT and then we had Mum. Our BERT and Mum, the search goats who've been there for 20 years, are those technologies. BERT and Mum are search technologies. There's probably a BERT in search. I'm sure there's a BERT somewhere. It's access time. What's up, Ellis? Yo, we're out here. It's Wednesday, isn't it? I don't even remember what day of the week it is half the time. I don't know either, but LA's gorgeous. And I am excited to be back on the road again soon. I was in the same place for about three weeks and that's been wonderful, but it's calling me. The road's calling me, Ellis. Also, where are you going next? So, Tahoe this weekend for some skiing with the family. I've not really skied before, so I'm a little nervous and obviously Tahoe had the awful blizzard. Dude, for real? Can you wear some risk guards for me, my man? We can't lose those typing hints, though I guess you're dictating a lot these days. I'm doing baby slubs. And the next week, quick trip to San Francisco for some AI meetings, some GDC, the big gaming conference, things, I got to try to attend as many fancy things as I can, and then South by Southwest, the following weekend. How many contacts are in your phone app, Ellis? That's a good question, I should look. Can we get a quick look? Does it show you? Does it actually give you-- Yeah, you have to press on the little left column. It says 1,437. I'm not impressed. Do you keep them elsewhere? Do you have a secret goal? I have stuff in signal I've got stuff elsewhere. You have a scoop CRM? Can you vibe code your own scoop CRM? That is on my to-do list. And we're going to talk about that. But first, if you're going to happen to be an Austin at South by, I'm doing two things. One is a panel with our friends at Superhuman. At their space, at Antoine's about taste and curation in the age of AI, why it matters. They're thinking about it for the pod, but also for the newsletter and sources, and that's going to be just a great one, I think. And then I'm going to be moderating a conversation with 10 cents, basically, head of gaming. Here in the United States, they have a ton of games in their portfolio, and they're a pretty black box kind of company. They don't really speak much, so that hopefully, that's interesting for people. That's on Tuesday. We do not need a badge to go to the Superhuman one, but you will need a South by badge for the 10 cent one. So funny. I feel like we keep discovering that you and I are interacting with the same company in different email threads. I mean, I'm working with Superhuman on their story right now. You're speaking at the Superhuman suite about why dudes like you wear shoes that look like hooves these days, and we got all of our bases covered. We do. New balances, I wanted to copy your new balances, years look more like hooves, which would seem to offer a lot of traction. Mine look more traditional, dad shoe. I'm on A6 right now. I'm on a bit of an A6 kick. I do have new balance that I love, but yeah, I just copped a couple of A6s that I'm really feeling. How do they compare? I feel like that's definitely a convoy in tech about what the best sneaker of the moment is. Now that all birds are out, atoms are out. And so Sam Alman wore these Lego limited editions that I saw on an interview and I was like, damn, those are sick. They're multi color, you know, the Lego colors. And I looked them up on stock X and of course they're like $1,000. So I didn't get those, but yes, I'm getting into sneakers slowly. I'm trying to not get to into it, but it's hard to not fall down the rabbit hole. Are you noticing any other fashion trends in your travels to all corners of the tech universe? Or is it just still vests and whatnot? It's not. No, I mean, I'll be curious to see what people are rocking in Austin. Super puffer jackets. I went to a Southern themed party recently and got a black bandana. So maybe I'll add that to whatever I'm wearing in Austin, you know, to keep it on theme. But yeah, no otherwise. I'm going to try to play some Texas hold of in Texas and have fun and get a go to a thing for Spotify and TikTok and I mean, you went to South by back in the day, right? It's, you remember the madness of it. Yeah. I mean, gosh, it was more than 10 years ago at this point. And I remember it kind of being like a PR free for all more than anything else. I mean, it's not clear why it exists. It just kind of spontaneously exists from year to year. But enough of that. Ellis, I think I've gotten you Claude Pills. Is that, is that right? You did. Yes. I realized I was kind of a bad boy for not trying out all the different services because I need to know how they all work. What they're good at, how their tone differs, how their context windows vary, all that good stuff. And yeah, I've been using Claude and really enjoying it. I think it certainly feels like more thoughtful and intellectual, which may not be for everybody, but for a writer think boy, like me, definitely fits the bill. But maybe more important than anything, it seems like instead of trying to build all their own apps, the way that open AI and chat GPT is, Claude seems to be happy to work across your apps, whether that is on the Mac app co-work that can access your local apps, or through the Chrome extension that can access your tabs that seems like it can do more in my experience than Atlas from OpenAI, which seems like what is even going on with that anymore. Really? I've been meaning to retry Atlas. I'm actually kind of double-fisting chat GPT and Claude right now to try to see where I want to land. Yeah, I was using Atlas a month or so ago and I was like, can you do this stuff for me and download some statements from my taxes? And it's like, I don't know how to download. I'm like, all right, bye. AGI will know how to download. I hope so. But honestly, I mean, one of those things that I always wanted from computers over the last 20 years is just to help me with my, like, OCD computer organizing, and now I've got Claude co-work mining through 25 years of documents in my Google Drive, all the gifts I've saved over the years of 500 different internet cats in my iCloud, images folder. And it's just kind of a pleasure. It seems obvious to me that AIs is going to be able to do this in any tab or any app in a pretty short time. But for now, this was kind of my first experience of having AIs actually organize some stuff meaningfully for me, and I do believe for most people a kind of a killer use case. I have so many things that I want to try with Claude co-work and Claude code on my list. Such as? Well, the custom CRM, I want it to analyze my subscriber list for sources and try to infer the best it can where people work. Better audience data that I can then use to inform what I do and the kind of brands that I work with. You know, just a bunch of back office stuff that I'd love to automate, and it's not perfect and from what I've seen it can often, you know, break. But I am hoping maybe this weekend between ski sessions that I'll get to spend some time on that. I actually got onboarded though this week to something that I'm very excited to play around with as well and have you get onto called Dreamer. Have you heard about this? I have. I have. So, it's a bunch of ex-early Android OG people who built Android, who have this new agent platform startup and it's kind of like agents for normies or friend Joanna Stern, also as an early user and has been trying it. The most normie of all of the reporters, which if you're listening, Joanna is a compliment. Joanna is more than normally. Come on. But Dreamer is really interesting. It's like, I'm trying to describe it, think like an app store for agents or kind of like what Wabi was doing and is doing for mobile apps, shout out, Eugenia, early guests, but for agents. And no code is needed, although you can code and see the code. And what's cool is that it's a marketplace. So if I make an agent, I can publish it and other Dreamer users can use it. And then when they use it, I actually get compensated as a percentage of the subscription revenue that they're paying Dreamer and how they use the agent. still figuring that model out. But I think that's a super cool idea in it because it incentivizes creation. And so the first agent I installed was one of the co-founders Hugo Barra made where it's a calendar super prep agent where it goes through your calendar and fills the metadata of each event with honestly pretty helpful overview of what the event is about based on the context of your email. You know, it obviously ingests all your Google stuff, gives you, like, you know, I'm about to do the interview with Liz for access, like, here's your context with Liz. Here's what she does. That sort of thing. And then auto generates an AI podcast that you can then create an agent to hook up to your Spotify to tell you about your day, which also is the idea of, like, Hux, shout out, Ryza, another early access guest, and kind of doing it all in one place where you can really make any agent and then have this chat GPT-like interface around it with all of your context, not just what you tell chat, it's super interesting, so excited to play around with that. It's a compelling value prop, especially for something that's separate. I mean, the meeting prep thing you described, I have been trying to painstakingly program my notion custom agent to do. But if somebody had come up with the perfect template already, I could have just added that, which is kind of what you're describing instead of trying to program it all myself, which is fun, editing all the instructions, specifying your perfect format. But you could also guess that a company like Dreamer or all the apps on that platform are kind of truly agnostic, you know, of all the different services and they prioritize trying to make the most of each connection as opposed to, you know, trying to keep you in their ecosystem. One other thing that strikes me as kind of nice about Dreamer is that those guys have a whole lot of experience when it comes to highly secure products for massive, massive audiences. And I do believe, you know, it's a problem with AI these days, whether it's with open clause we've talked about or a lot of these startups is that you don't know if your stuff is safe when you plug in Gmail, when you plug in Notion, when you plug in all these connectors. So, while technically any startup can add all these same connectors, the growing number of connectors through an API or through MCP or otherwise certainly feels good to know who's behind this one. Yeah, for sure. Did you see this viral post of Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and some coffee shop in San Francisco with what looks to be the same device that was in the viral fake Alexander Skarsgard Super Bowl commercial that we talked about recently. Did you see this? Oh, I did. And I've been up all night thinking about it. I don't have this totally confirmed, but my understanding is that this was a paid thing. I mean, it's pretty obvious when you look at the video the way the camera like abruptly goes down at the end as if he's like, you know, getting seen and needs to hide that he's filming. It's also like the most friggin' famous coffee shop in San Francisco sitting at the bar at Cyclass. This is no iPhone 4 left at the bar. Right. So my favorite theory that I've heard is that this is a very clever, subtle marketing campaign from some kind of startup who is also asking people on X through like marketing agencies to apply and boost this post. And that to me suggests there is a startup that is doing this weird looking AI, metallic orb device. People think it's open AI. I don't think it is. I don't think this is the Johnny I've way of launching a product at all. And I don't think this is what it will look like, but, you know, knock on wood. I guess I could be wrong. But I just want to know what's starting up this is that's doing this. It looks for those who haven't seen it. The case looks quite a bit bigger than an AirPods case and it kind of looks like a big stainless steel, like almost like modern clamp, like literally a clamshell with a little indentation of Put Your Thumb. And then the earbuds are also stainless steel. And instead of only going in your ears, they have a bar that almost like a piece of jewelry that, you know, some people might wear as earrings wraps around the back of your ear. I think some people were speculating it was like bone conduction or something like that. I don't know. I honestly don't appreciate these types of stunts. I really don't. Well, we'll see. We'll see if it ever shows. Maybe it's just because I don't know how to make them for companies. All right. Well, this week we have our second Google executive on the show. We had Samir Samat, the head of Android on, who was actually one of our best performing episodes. So the pressure is on for the head of search at Google. I've known Liz for a little bit. I actually interviewed her recently at the IAB publisher conference. She had to tell a room full of publishers why Google wasn't destroying them. And I got to moderate that conversation, so that was, that was fun. Maybe not as fun for her as this episode of Access. But that was where I last saw her. Liz is a really interesting figure in tech. I mean, she obviously runs search, which is, I don't know, we were talking about this interview, maybe the most influential software product of all time, certainly. Well, she kept it real. I thought, I mean, I wasn't super familiar with her. But for a 20 year Google veteran, I was expecting like, you know, a lot of, a lot of scriptedness. But it's interesting. She seems like a true Googler, almost like a scientist who's just working on problems they love. And so, she appreciated her, uh, candor with an incredibly important job and an incredibly unique vantage point on the industry. So yeah, I was great to have Liz on. Let's, uh, let's throw it to Liz. Sounds good. [Music] This episode is brought to you by Accenture. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Learn more at Accenture.com/Spotify. That's new. Ready to make anything online make sense? Check responses set up require compatibility and availability vary 18 plus. Hello Liz. Hello. How are you doing? I don't think Alex even realized you joined. That's alright. You snuck right in. I, well, I understand sometimes how these things go. We're like, if you're not careful, you've got three other tabs covering the space and you're waiting and you're distracted and then people come. Yeah. How's your Chrome looking right now? How many tabs are in the row? Are we grouping? Are we pro at this? Not very many at the moment, so hopefully it doesn't crash. That'll be the, that'll be the goal. When else and I were waiting for you to get on just now, we were just saying, like, gosh, you've got to be in back-to-back all day long. Is that like every day for you? I try. I always try to make sure I have some thinking time and some email time. But yes, to a first approximation, there's a lot of conversations on a quite a wide range of different topics too. It'll be like, let's go brainstorm this product question. Let's brainstorm the future. Let's fix this current product. Let's go talk about legal. Let's go talk with you all. I just, we just celebrated some of my team who's been 20 years at Google right before this, so that was kind of fun. Oh my goodness. Did they get a special treat or a new type of hat for Google Legends? I mean, we do a few things for them. But yes. Yeah. 20 years is quite a long time. I mean, that's about your tenure as well, right? I am, yes, 22 and a half maybe now. Oh my goodness. I know you've moved around a bit, but I was at Snapchat in the early days for almost eight years. And I feel like for every year you're there, you're attached to one more permanent recurring meeting as you sit in and try and do things. I mean, even like, how does your inbox look these days? I feel like the longer you've been at a company, the more in disarray it can be. Well, I switched a few years ago from geo to search, so that created a reset on most of the meetings and the inbox. There's lots of exciting things and then we have new features like AI overviews and Gmail that you can play with and hopefully help make some of it easier, but it's a good place for AI to improve my productivity. There's lots of opportunities there. You were super early at Google. You were one of the first female engineers, is that right? I was in the New York office. I was the first female engineer, but not in the company for sure. I think there were, I don't know, less than 2,000 people when I joined. I don't know if it was like 1,000 or 1,200 or something like that. But the New York office was 10 engineers-ish when I joined. It's rare to work in a place for that long. I feel like especially now, I feel like millennials and Gen Z are used to job switching and hopping around a lot. It's interesting because I joined, when I joined Google, I didn't come from a family with tech background. My mother was a math teacher and my dad was selling insurance. In my mind, people didn't change, and I was from a small town. And so people didn't change jobs all the time growing up and I started at Google and people like, yeah, you know, genuinely in tech you're only at a company for like one to two years and I was like, what is this concept that I'm just not familiar with? But that was the expectation they set as I'd probably be there a couple of years and then move on and, you know, it's been ten times that since. Well, I was going to say, what's been keeping you there for over two decades? There's got to be something. Besides money, of course. Besides Google stock. No, I mean, I think there's like three things I generally care about. I find one, I want to work with like, people I enjoy working. I tend to work hard. I spend a lot of time. I would like to, if be people I respect, I feel like I can learn from, you know, it's intimidating and fun to feel like you're not the smartest person in the room most of the time, right? On the thing. And in fact, you're maybe one of the least smart people in the room, right? So like that sense of energizing, but that people really want to create great things, I think is one. The second thing that the mission of the projects I've been on has really resonated. So I was on Google Maps for a long time. Now I'm on search, right? These are products that not just billions of people use, but they turn to for things that matter, right? It's not just this is just a job. It's okay. People now use this so that they don't get lost. Like when I started, this is hard for some Gen Z to understand. Like we grew up in a world where like if you made a wrong turn or you went to something, you might be like stuck wandering around. I remember printing map quests directions to get to Disney. When I first started, there wasn't a map quest, right? It wasn't even a map quest. There was an atlas in the back of your car and, you know, that was what you hoped you did and otherwise you stopped at a gas station, right? So the freeing power of being in this world where like you can go to a strange country because you don't even speak the language of a navigated, right? Like what does that unlock? Now you have a thing where people turn to search for like their fun trivia and they turn to it for their health questions and they turn to it like to figure out how they educate themselves on a new skill or learn something and that's kind of very inspiring. And then the last thing I like is I like challenges, right? Like if I, you know, you can always learn, but like there's different levels of learning. So over the years when I got sort of most asking the question about was I going to stay? It was never about the mission, it was never about the people. I always really liked them. It was like am I challenging myself and not and I, but I found a place to change within Google that put me a little bit in the deep end, definitely still the case these days with the how fast the world is changing, but I like that sense of learning to swim and face the challenge. Well, thank you for Google Maps because my first and only car accident was trying to read a map quest print out when I was 16 years old, rear ended the crap out of somebody was quaking in my boots had to call my dad, hi dad, I know you're listening out there. Thanks for coming that day to help deal with that for me. And now it's just such a fact of life. And I mean, I think that raises, you know, an interesting question that we wanted to talk about is for these products like maps and search and, and otherwise that people have made such a part of daily life. How are you thinking about bringing AI into this stuff? I mean, people have such expectations for what these products are. And I think we all know that nobody likes when their furniture gets moved around, when you keep putting new things at the top of the page, when new features come out. And I feel like Google search has remained pretty, pretty solid in its vision for like what this perfect experience is. And I feel like whether it's with knowledge graph or AI, that's kind of getting shaken up right now. How do you guys think about the pace of, of introducing those things? I know there's a lot of pressure from the market to just go fast, fast, fast. Um, so I guess a couple, a couple of things. One, I do think it's like easy to think about searches sort of somewhat static before AI, but actually if you go back in time, like the knowledge graph was a big thing and it was, you know, over 10 years ago, and like, you know, sometimes if you go and you do a print out for, for people about like what search used to look like 10 years ago, they're like, what, like what is this product? Right. You sort of forget how it, how it changes over time across. We introduce things like lens and voice and all, a different one. I do think we try and take that responsibility very seriously, okay? Like it is, um, it's not just like nobody likes the furniture, but like people are choosing it in a way that they rely on, right? And so you don't want to make it hard, um, but also there's just tremendous opportunity. And so you think about how to balance it. So I think we, um, you know, first did this with SG, okay, we want to go figure out how we allow early adopters and they can opt in. And then we brought it to AI overviews, but we did it amidst the SERP. Um, when we introduced AI mode, we didn't like swap everybody over from SERP to AI mode. We made it possible to enter along. And so trying to allow people to sort of participate more and more as, as they're ready in, in different ways. I have been surprised by how fast people like, um, uh, appreciated AI overviews started using AI overviews just started searching more, right? Um, I think it's, um, for many people in the world, not necessarily in your circles, but like, uh, overviews is how they've experienced AI sort of first and primarily in their life, right? Are you accusing me of not hanging out with normies? Well, because I sometimes do, I sometimes do. I make no accusations, but I feel like sometimes until I can value living a world where, you know, just rounded and then I go back to my home and, you know, New Hampshire and, you know, it's a very different, it's a very different environment. Um, and so this is often how people encounter, um, but I think for a lot of it, when we, when we do our job, right, it's so intuitive and, and, and it sort of opens up things that they couldn't do previously, that they just start doing it, right, and, and they start adapting it. Um, so we saw people use search more with AI overviews and we saw it much more quickly than we generally do. We always sort of assume to your point about moving furniture that there's a learning effect. It takes time. It's something, how long does it take for people to figure out, how it works, does it work, does it even exist? I think if I gave, you know, even Googlers a survey of what are all the features in search and I threw in like a few fake ones and asked them to identify the fake ones. I'm not sure they would all, I'd be able to identify which ones were fake and which ones were real, um, because there's so much possibility. But people really picked up, um, with AI overviews very quickly. Um, and that was really, really delightful to see. When you took over a search, it was a really critical time for Google people were going, you know, a chat to BTs going to eat searches lunch. This is all zero sum, uh, Googles and trouble. And here you go. You raise your hand. You're over on maps, which is just kind of cruising along and I feel like it's just been on this consistent upward trajectory in terms of, uh, importance to the world. And you're like, yeah, I'll go take this challenge. I've never actually heard you talk about that. What was that like deciding to go take on search at that moment? Because I imagine there was just a tremendous amount of pressure. You've got to secretly kind of love the pressure, I think, to take that job in that moment. Well, so actually, um, I moved to search before, um, that moment, but the search was sort of in a few different pieces. I moved actually, um, I don't know, a year into COVID, maybe, which was, but was a different time of pressure on others. Like you, you join a new team and you can't meet any of the people in person, right? Like, you know, for all of these years, a whole bunch of how you go and you build relationships as you meet people in person, I had grown up with the maps team for years and years and years. Um, they knew me, the people under it, and then I'm like, hi, I'm your new, you know, manager, your new leader, sorry, you can't see me in person for, for, in months. I switched it in part because like, candidly, my boss was like, I would like you to do this job. But like, how do you say, how do you say no to search, right? It's like people will sometimes say like, you know, how do you say no if somebody asked you to do the thing, not just a beloved product, but kind of like the essence of what Google was about. I mean, it's definitely top three most influential internet products of all time. Maybe maybe arguably the most you called it even like the one of the best businesses of all time, last night on the phone, Alex and I was like, whoa, actually, yeah, yeah, I think, I think it was, um, like both tremendously exciting and tremendously intimidating to like move and be leading a big part of search and then to take on, uh, to your point, then when I got asked to take on all of search, um, sort of in the middle of, of this time, it's a lot of responsibility, right? Like you have multiple billion people using this product every day has been iconic for the last 25 years and you're like, I am going to share for that and, you know, I'm going to hope I'm going to are you satisfied with your impact, Liz, that you're affecting multiple billions per day to be very clear. My team will tell you I am never satisfied, right? Um, I am always a person who's like, Oh, but, you know, here's what could be, here's what the opportunities, here's how I could do better, um, that's a, uh, I just love how all the tech companies are like come to our company and you could have big impact. We have one employee for every five million users or something like that for Google. That's a, that's a crazy ratio. Even though you guys have a lot of employees, that's still a crazy ratio. It's like actually, so like my town that I grew up in for, for much of my childhood is, is 900 people. Okay. I had a bunch of cousins. It's not like I had never left a town, but like it is mind boggling to work in tech with this idea that what you do, it touches, it's touches people halfway around the world. And like it also touches your mother, right? Like if you don't do a good job with this, then your mother, my mother is a very kind person, okay? But like she's entrusting a bunch of choices, like how well what does search tell her, right? And that is a big responsibility, but it's also a big opportunity. Like everybody I know, nobody I know is like I am bored. I don't know what to do with my time. I wish I had more work to do, right? Like people have a lot of things they have to do in their life and a lot of things they'd like to do if they could find more time, right? How do you navigate search? This is so you can help people enjoy the things they want to do and get rid of a bunch of the stuff they don't. And to me, that's a very fulfilling thing. - My four year old says she's bored constantly. - Okay, four year olds do. I do agree with you that like 10, like four year olds, my children sometimes tell me they're bored. But none of the adults I know feel bored. But the children feel bored, yes. - Last time we saw each other, you were telling me actually your kids are frequently telling you to fix things in search. So you also have to be tech support for your kids. - They do give me bugs and they send and the ones. And then my daughter tells me I should dog food my product. I was like, I'm pretty sure I'm doing that pretty once, but she's like, you ask this question. You should just use your product and see how it does. And I was like, okay, yes, I understand. - Speaking of kids though, I feel like, do you remember those moments early on in Google where everybody was accusing Google of outsourcing all of our brains and all our knowledge and what's gonna happen to children and their minds when they don't have to use a calculator anymore. Law and division, they could find everything on Google. And that just kind of came and went. And do you feel like it's any different this time around with AI? - Yes and no. I think there's always this question about like are we still teaching people to think, right? And I don't think creating tools means that there's no opportunity to think. It just means that we need to like make sure when we're teaching people to think that we sort of are aware that the tools exist, right? I got this feedback about Google maps by the way. Like people can't, like on the one hand, people have lost the ability to navigate using, you know, just their memory and their towns as much on that. And the other hand, like you freed people to explore the world. - I've been living in LA for five years. I do not know the difference between the 101 and the five because I literally never look at highways or roads. - We lost some skill, but as a result, you unlocked new things, okay? I think what's a little different with AI is it's changing quickly enough that there's a little bit of this challenge of like do teachers know how, like do we know how to help teach kids in the presence of these tools? Like calculators didn't kind of go from nowhere to like in everybody's hands overnight. And so you could sort of think about that. And so I think, you know, whatever tools they are when done well, they allow you to do harder tasks, right? They allow you to put your critical thinking on even more difficult things. Done poorly, you're asking people to do things that the tools can already do. And then, you know, people cheat, right? In different ways. And so I think the challenge for society is to figure out how are we using the tools to push what we can do even more? Not to replace thinking, but to use it for the next task. - It's funny because I know the Google famous interview questions, which I know have changed a lot over the years. You know, ostensibly we're a way to test your thinking and your reasoning. I mean, what do those even look like in five years? - Well, five years feels like an eternity now. I talked with my team. - Okay, let's do two and a half. - Let's do two and a half. - You know, I think in a, well, even two and a half years, like if you go back two and a half years ago, like do you know where we were two and a half years ago? Right? Like go back in time. - Alex didn't even have a newsletter back then. - Yeah. - That thing, right? You know, that was the biggest change. - That was the biggest change in the world in the last two and a half years, for sure. I think the questions, though, are a lot about like continue to be. Can you think through? Can you reason? Can you use tools effectively? It's not like we asked, you know, software engineers, when I started, can you do assembly language, right? Like you weren't expected to use assembly language. You weren't expected to write code without an ID. You could use an ID, okay? Now, how do you collaborate effectively with AI, right? And so I think those questions are not sort of, pretend there's no AI, but can you do it softly? Can you use it to orchestrate? Can you understand how to debug things? Can you think through what things to consider, right? If you assume that the tools get much better, but that they're imperfect, do you have the reasoning to look for where they might to be imperfect? And I think that's how those questions evolve. And that can be in software engineering or it can be in product management or it can be in data science, right? Like you, what's, you know, you can offload the easy questions and data analysis. What are the hard questions? - A bit of a galaxy brain question that just came to me. Are you guys talking about internally a future where maybe agents are the ones crawling Google the most on behalf of humans? And like it's not humans going to Google, but agents will be. Do you think that'll happen? - Well, I certainly think the, there will be a world in which sort of agents are doing a lot of interaction on the internet, not just people, okay? I personally don't believe in a world where it's all agents, right, in the sense that I still think that people sometimes want, you know, want to hear directly from other people. Like it's different, you know, do I want to go and say like, Ellis, please tell me what Alex says or would I just be like Alex, what did you say, right? Like it's not always fun to be disintermediated, right? You often want to hear from the source directly, but the fact that you can kick off 10 agents and you have limited time and the agents don't necessarily. I do think probably means there's a world in which a lot of agents are talking with each other and not just with humans going forward as we evolve. - And does that impact Google positively or negatively search? - I think that's all about how we all navigate the innovation space, right? Like I think on right it impacts it positively, right? Okay, like search enables people to do harder tasks and search is a great tool other people can use and agents can use and what does that look like? I think we'll have to figure out. But I think Google has a long history of saying the world keeps changing, I mean mobile was a, it's maybe hard to believe now, but at the time when mobile came, mobile was like this big question for Google. Like Google was a desktop product and could it navigate and oh my gosh, the screen was smaller and are there gonna be any ads and is the whole business gonna fall apart, right? I mean, this was a major question when mobile came out and the company ended up stronger through it because it rallied to the moment and I think we are at heart a tech company and this is a time when tech is flourishing in terms, like tech is a technology, right? What is its core DNA is being great at using technology and this is a time when the technology is being amazing. So if we all do our job right, I think Google will do well as it navigates it. - This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When you're advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. The result, less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. I work with a lot of startups for most of the week in my work at Meaning. And one of the tried and true startup arguments to investors press otherwise, is that we are gonna be able to move or act more quickly than the incumbents and a lot of times it's Google or Microsoft or Apple. But it feels like in some ways that y'all have really kicked yourselves into gear and accelerated the pace over the last few years. Is that just my perception or was there kind of a critical moment internally where it's like AI is happening, let's go. - I don't know that I would say it's like a single moment. I think you have a series of moments that build. I mean, I think Sundar started talking about this is gonna be in an AI company. I don't know how many years before some of these things come. But I do think what sort of has like been accelerating is what's possible with the tools and what are the opportunities? Like the technology is getting so much better faster. It's not that in some of these cases people didn't build demos five years ago. It's they built the demo and like it didn't really work. And it was really hard and it was gonna take like 20 engineers, two years to tune it to try and get that. And like what used to be 20 engineers? Sometimes that task now you can have one engineer do in less time, right? And so, So I think that really unlocked. So a bunch of the search engineers have been in search a long time, like 10, 15, the number of 20-year-old, 20-year anniversaries we celebrate every quarter is kind of mind-boggling to me, right? Sometimes, like, these engineers and product folks had these ideas 15 years ago and they didn't work. And they had the ideas 10 years and then they had the ideas five years. And then you try it and it's like, "Whoa, it works now, right? Like that's, that's energizing and that energy builds on top of it, right? Like when you see that you try something and it works, when you see that you can move faster, it makes you want to move faster because like we all, we all want our time to like be valuable, right? For it to have the impact. Like if we're going to work, you want it to reap rewards. And I think it's energizing to people to see that it feels like they're not optimizing as much. They're inventing. The examples of those things that were thought of 15 years ago that are only possible now. I mean, I was thinking of Google Duplex being able to call places for you and make reservations. I mean, that was an agent before we called it an agent. Now it's actually possible. So I would say that's a good example where it was an agent before we called an agent and we could do very few verticals with a lot, a lot of work, right? And now our bill, you know, it's like, okay, you had this whole team that worked on it for this one thing for many, many months. And now the rate at which we can expand. I think like with the recent launch of personal intelligence, I mean, if you go back long enough at Google, we try to do this effort in which we were putting more personal content and using it to leverage, but I don't think it felt like it unlocked it in different ways. I think people had played with, I mean, LLMs had been in search long before. We had, we had birth and then we had mum, but they were mostly used in limited use cases because the quality wasn't good enough. The speed wasn't good enough, right? Like you can't, you can't come to, like, guess what? I can do this thing that's better, but you have to go wait 20 seconds. Like people, people on search are sensitive to 100 millisecond difference, right? Like they will search more or less for 100 milliseconds, right? So you had to get the tech to the point where like, wait a second, if you did this online, it was fast enough for people. And it was good enough for people to be net better. Are Bert and mum the search goats who've been there for 20 years or those technologies? There's probably a Bert inside me. I'm sure there's a Bert somewhere in the company and possibly in search. On the ones? Yes. There are a lot of ICs on a first name basis, but Bert and mum are technologies. They were early uses of LLMs, but they were mostly on the ranking side because when we tried to do it on the UI side, we couldn't get it fast enough in high enough quality. So if we did something, we're going to do it offline, sort of pre-processed, going forward. I think lens when it first started was kind of cool, but didn't work most of the time. And now it feels like you just take for granted that you can take a picture of a shoe and get the right particular Nike model and not just, oh, this is a Nike shoe, right? Like those things weren't possible years ago. So I think there's, I mean, I think they're just all over the place of what's possible. But sometimes it's not just the big things. It's just the little things. Like I tried to make this thing work internationally. I couldn't. One of the one that's been most excited to me is in the US, we think of like, well, most content you care about is on the web. If you're in India and you speak Hindi, let alone you speak a different dialect or language, right? Like, no, the information is not all on the web, right? Certainly not in your language, okay? And it used to be like, oh, what are we going to do? Are we going to translate all the content on the web into all the languages? That's not scalable. But now with an LLM, you can take information in one language, understand it, and then output in another language. Like that opens up information. YouTube auto dubbing, I think, is incredible. Like I've been watching a lot more international videos, yeah. Right. And that, you know, okay, well, were you going to learn how to speak all those languages? Were you going to hire somebody in 100 languages? Or even 10 languages to dub your thing? No, you weren't going to be able to scale that. So I think that ability to like unlock content to, you know, everyone, not just speakers of languages, is fascinating. And it means we have a lot more impact in a great way in helping people around the world. Google is a large company and I don't think people from the outside fully understand the difference between what your team is doing and what Demis and the Gemini team are doing and how you guys work together and also how you have different directions that you're going. I remember when you and I spoke at the IB conference recently, you told me that Gemini has a different North Star than search. I think that was what you said. Can you explain what that means? Because from the outside, it looks like AI mode and Gemini are converging on each other pretty fast. So it's interesting. So maybe to just start with Demis's team, Demis has like obviously different subteams under them. One of them is Karai's team, which is working on the underlying model. And then there's teams like that are working on the Gemini app, which is sort of what you're working on them. And the way we work with them is sort of a little bit different now, right? We're sharing a lot of the underlying model and technology. And so we work very closely with the teams on the model and we'll work by directionally. So number one, there's a new model. Here's what's now possible, how do you want to use it? But we'll also go and be like, okay, I understand you have this lovely benchmark, but let me tell you what it looks like in practice. 80% may seem awesome on a benchmark. You can't be wrong one in five times in terms of not showing people the sports score. If they asked for the sports score, they want to see the sports car 100% of the time. So you're popping a lot of AI research or bubbles. It sounds like a lot of give and take about the reality of, you know, what does it take to build a product that like people can rely on and build? And so like we push each other in a bunch of ways. I think with Josh's team, we share some of the same underlying technologies. We share ideas, but they do have different north stars. And what I was saying to the other one is like, Gemini's focus is on sort of being the assistant. And so it tends to lean in more heavily on things like productivity or creation, right? On ones searches more information based. And it believes that often in those information use cases, you also want to connect and hear from other people. And so how do you bring out the web? And so we sort of focus on making those two things awesome. But then like you can't, it never works to go tell people this product can only be used for this or that and then like hope that they understand, right? Like people will come to the product and do whatever they want, okay? And if you take a non-search Gemini example, people come to YouTube for things that you might think to come and search, especially like in India, the YouTube versus search usage is very different. And in the U.S., right? How people use them. So you kind of have to meet users where they are. If they come to your product and they want to use these things, then you should make it possible. And we want the capabilities to be used. You take something like Gem, Nanomanana, which in its first version felt like mostly sort of fun for creativity and doing that. Nanomanana 2 allows like really good infographics, okay? Well, infographics is back in that information space. So how are we going to use that to convey, right? And so we think about it as like sharing some of the capabilities, but building excellence in key areas, if that makes sense. Do you think they ever converge and just become one thing or do they always stay separate? Because I guess if I ask Gemini a question and I ask AI mode or AI overview a question and I get the same answer, then why do they both exist? I don't know the answer is the short answer. I think what we see is some areas they're converging more and some areas they're diverging more, right? And so what are they going to net out? Like do the areas that diverged eventually all come or do the areas that diverge become even bigger over time, I think we'll see. I think if you ask a math question, we should give you the same answer to a first approximation. But even in a math question, we've started to experiment more with not just links in the product, but like videos in the product. So in search, you might expect to get like great video tutorials from like those cool teachers that make those concepts, you know, memorable, right? And so you still want to answer if they ask the question. But maybe we're going to encourage you to take the next step a little bit differently than that. I think with some of the verticals we're seeing how they go and there's sort of some not complete divergence, but you know, how do you experience it? What needs to be quick and easy? How do you want to surface the web? I think is an area that we're still very early on and ripe for exploration. We've started to do more things with things like inline links, you know, how do you quote and allow people to dive deeper into that? So I don't know in all honesty, but I think we are right now at a point where depending on what angle you look at, you think they're getting closer or they're getting further apart. And so we'll see. But AI mode has not been out like for general use for a year yet, like we sometimes, I sometimes forget this maybe the world, like it's relatively new. And so an even Gemini app given how quickly the world is evolving, it's changing a lot. And so I think we'll have to see. And then like who knows, maybe agents will mean like the right product is neither of the two of them is a third product altogether that they merge into. I don't know yet. So to be totally frank, I spend a lot of my AI time on chat, GPT or cloud or other various types of services. And I've kind of kept my googling to like the stuff I've always Googled, song lyrics, pictures of Tom Cruise and other celebrities. Like that's what Google is kind of about in my mind. Is there an effort to kind of get those 800 million chat GPT ears back to Google or is it kind of about the next five billion more so? Well, I guess I would say a couple of things. I think most feel free to tell me I don't matter because that's a very valid business strategy. But I'm actually going to tell you what I actually tell you if you use your example is you're still using Google. Okay. And so like what's interesting in many of these cases is that the sort of balance of how people are using multiple tools is actually like sort of really evolving. I think if you go back some amount of time last year, where did most people do image generation? And what was considered like the place people went to for image generation? And where do people do a lot of image generation? Now it's like changed a few times about where the centers are. And so I think right now we're in this world where it's very fluid. Like people's habits are not solidified across. You know, you essentially listed two other products you're using besides search. So you haven't picked a single one and you're still using search in some cases in whatever else, right? And I think that's just indicative of where the world is. It's still figuring out. I don't know, by the way, that we're going to end up in a world where there's only one product, right? Like I think you also saw this with, um, you know, people will be like, oh, social media, there's going to be one winner. Okay, well, you've got YouTube shorts and you've got Instagram reels and you've got TikTok, right? But actually the space that, although there's three of them there, the space is much bigger than any of them were at any time, right? Like the pie has really grown. And I think that's what we're generally seeing in the industry is people are using the tools collectively much more. And so there's a lot of growth. Um, but I think what we mostly try and do as like, I don't think we think of it as like the next five billion or the eight hundred million in like that simplistic way. It's really like what feels best in class with the market? Where are the growth? Where are the things that people aren't even thinking about? Um, how do you just really live up to the mission and help people with as much as possible? And then teach people about what's possible? Uh, a great thing about searching a hard thing about search is, um, most people use it. Therefore, most people think they know how to use it. Right? Um, and so there's this interesting, um, thing in search and teaching somebody like you unlock this feature today. Oh, yeah. I mean, in startup turns, it's a great wedge. Like I think a lot of people don't even know what they would ask chat GPT or even what it can do quite yet. And if you just kind of start revealing that stuff through Google, I mean, I'm very receptive to like the idea or hypothesis that Google may actually went out here given all the existing use cases where people are asking questions. Now the answers are just going to get dramatically better, more informed, better cited, all that stuff. Well, but yeah, Alice, there's also your behavior that you talked about. And like, you know, Liz, my wife Chloe is a, is a chat addict. Every time I look at her phone or laptop, it's chat GPT. And I just asked her the other day ahead of this interview. I was like, how much do you use Google nowadays? Since I got you hooked on chat GPT in the last six months. And she's like, maybe 10% as much. Uh, I use it to fact check the AI a lot, but she's definitely not doing those kind of emerging use case fact check in depth highly monetizable searches that she was. And there is probably a decent chunk of your most highly monetizable, you know, users in North American Europe that are that have shifted their behavior that way. Maybe not, but I'm just wondering, I mean, obviously like Google's doing very well financially. But yeah, like the space is just growing rapidly, right? Um, there's, it's, it's really weird for people to think about in that they, they, they, most people think they're asking the tools they're using all of the questions they could think of. And so like, everything is zero sum. But that's, that's actually not what happens, right? Um, you kind of go through this calculus without even realizing it, which is like, I had this question. First of all, do I even realize I could get the answer? And then if I realize I could get the answers at worth my time, like, is it going to work? Is it not? Do I have like, is it hard to ask? Is it not? Um, and so I think what we're seeing is like simultaneously, people are adopting more tools and searches growing, right? Because the, the possibility of the tech is just allowing many more questions. Um, and so I think this space is just getting much, much bigger. Um, and if you think about that, like when you didn't have a mobile phone, and the only time you asked questions online was when you were at a desktop and you booted up your desktop. And by the way, you had to hope that nobody else in the household was on the computer at the time you wanted to ask the question. You just didn't ask the question. Um, and I think we're seeing the bar get lower and lower. And so the amount of questions people are asking the tasks that they would have struggled with that now instead of struggling with they ask for help, right? Like, people use the tools to help them rewrite an, uh, an email. They previously use a tool. They just struggle with it and bang their head and spend 20 minutes trying to write the email. And now they ask for help and write the email faster. Um, so I think we just think the space is growing very, very rapidly. I think there's also one thing that we haven't discussed yet, which is when you think about what is likely to make your first AI experience or a 10 of AI experience good. It is if it gets you, right? And I think you could argue that Google has better context on you than any other company. Um, what, what are your thoughts on that and bringing that stuff to the fore? Uh, is that creepy for people or is that magical? And do you have more context than anybody else? Well, there are, there are several billion people in the world. I don't think we can make a statement about do we have more context than everybody for every person in the world by any stretch. Um, but I do think in a bunch of cases, we do know, um, uh, you know, the systems know a bunch and AI's ability to parse it together is doing that. I think personal intelligence was a, was like one of our first steps there, right? Um, and I think it's, um, it can be really, um, delightful and surprising. Sometimes what it gets, right? So I had, um, I had a coworker who asked, he was like, stuck in the airport for like a few hours and he's like, what should I do? And I was like, well, given this passion, there's this cool store at this terminal. And by the way, you need to leave 40 minutes ahead and this credit card actually lets you get into this lounge, right? And like a bunch of things that he wouldn't have even thought to ask. Um, and it wasn't just like a basic recommendation, right? It wasn't like, you know, which restaurant should I eat? Right. Um, so I think it can be very delightful. One of the things we did as part of it was that it is a deliberate consent. You have to opt it. Okay. Like we don't want to do it to people. If you want your information siloed, you should be able to keep the information separate. Um, but if you want that value, we shouldn't be like, well, you might not want the value. So sorry, Alice, you can't get it, right? Like it should be in the hands of people to make that choice. Um, but then we think there's nothing as like one of my favorite things I do now is like I ask many more questions of like, okay, I, I have this challenge. We're like, okay, I have three kids. I have a job. I'm going to do something with them on the weekend. How much time am I going to spend figuring out what I'm going to do with them on the weekend, right? Because I'm going to spend the time with them. But I don't have like an hour to prep. So if I don't have enough time, then I'm going to do something boring, which is the same thing I did like two weekends ago. Um, but now I'm finding that it, I can use personal intelligence to understand more of like where I like to go with my kids, what I enjoy. And then it just speeds up finding something fun to do, um, deeply relate to that use case. Um, yes, people are like, you know, people have time to have fun. They just don't have time to plan. Planning is hard. How many people do you know like spend like 30 minutes looking to pick the movie that they're going to then go watch for like an hour, right? Like it's just, it's just ridiculous and some of these things. And so we can reach people to make that much easier for people don't get Alice going on this else, Ellis is a planner with that stuff for sure. Um, Liz, I wanted to know how you're feeling about the health of the web right now. And what Google actually indexes and there, there was something you said at the conference again where we had that interview recently where you basically warned a room full of publishers to just try to use the tools in a way that doesn't produce more slop and to actually use them to elevate. And I have to imagine Google is trying to fight back a ton of slop right now and spam like you all have never seen. And yeah, what is the is the internet in a precarious moment right now? The open internet. People have created slop for a long time before it was AI slop. AI slop allows them to create it faster, okay? But um, it's not a new problem. It's just sort of the next level scale of the problem, right? People would um, pay people in other countries to create, you know, rip off essentially surface level content, 20 versions of the content, et cetera, on the ones and so it does. Um, so that's something that like Google does have a bunch of experience of fighting spam and we have to like stand or toes, like it's a cat and mouse game. You are never done, right? The commercial incentives for other people are there. Um, so I think there is a lot of AI slop being generated for sure. I also also think there continues to be a lot of great content generated and I think sometimes AI creates helps people create better content and sometimes it helps create Slop and so I think it's important to separate did you use AI as a tool or did you create Slop right you're trying to bring to life the vision you have for what a great living room could have to write something okay like that's can sometimes be very hard for for people are you good at one thing but you're not as good a speaker at some other thing right you you know can you use it to help you write better and more clearly but I do think we have to fight it from the search side of making sure that we get the the great content and I also think it's a time for creators and journalists in different ways to say like are you producing great content that is really interesting to people or if you're creating the same junk 100,000 other people are and just hoping your content is going to surface stop that's known as good right I think it's been pretty interesting to see how much movement there has been to user-generated content in the world right like people are switching what they go they're listening to more podcasts they're hearing directly more creators and influencers right like but you know like sometimes people like oh well there's there's no you know journalism these days and you're like what is that but like people listen to for our podcast right like somehow different places but like different places right it's it's in ways that it feels like it brings it alive to people in different ways and so I feel like it's still a exciting opportunity for creators in so many ways and part of our job is to make sure that we surface that awesome content right that the people who create that content feel like they thrive in that world does it mean do these shifts you're talking about mean you'll have to be a little more creative with how you index and what you index and that you can't I mean a lot of this stuff's gonna be pay-walled yeah pay-walled or it's audio only or it's like hit in behind an RSS feed or it's proprietary to some app like how do you actually index all this stuff when the bottom does seem to be falling out of like traditional search traffic reliant publishing I mean I'm sure you've seen that chart that's been going wow or recently about all these tech outlets that have lost you know 50 to 90% of their traffic including the verge where else might work and that just has a real profound shift on where content shows up and then it's your job is the head of search like still index that content which means there's a few different things to your point about audio the great thing about L one of the great things about LMS is their multimodal so we can actually like understand audio content and video content actually the level we couldn't years ago so that becomes exciting some pay-wall content people still allow Google to crawl right and and surface so it's not necessarily that is absent or we have deals with some set of ecosystems where they they give us content streams across I think pay-walls is complicated for users because like they're not always willing to pay and so it's a complicated calculation you know how do you think about that but I generally feel like you know search is able to find most of the you know the content that's out there and and in fact you know new opportunities are being created with the fact that like now you can understand audio much better now you can understand video much better now you can understand not just the like video transcription but like what is the video more about or what's the style or other things like that so I think I think there's still a lot of content available I think everyone together is trying to figure out what makes great content how do you reach audiences I think one thing Google is trying to do a lot more of we've taken small steps so far but I want to do more how do you help when there is that relationship so like we did this thing with preferred sources there's started to be experiments across Google with you know how do subscriptions change right so like if you love this source and you do have a relationship with that then that content should surface more easily for you on Google I have banned I have banned so many sources from my Google news over the years it's like I feel that's when I feel most powerful okay but like if we love you know if a user loves access but I'm gonna do action Ellis if a user loves access and they ask question right like we should and you had a great story on it the question shouldn't be like how does your content rank you know equivalently for six billion people it's like that's really interesting for me so like surface at higher for me right reinforce and build that connection if you have a cooking subscription with someone can we make sure that those those recipes show up even more and that you know that you can click through right like people hate getting links that they get to and then they have to bounce back because they can't get through to the content and they're not willing to do it but sometimes those people have decided to pay somebody and not the other six people well then we should surface the the one that they're paying for and not the six that they can't get access to more so I think there's a lot of opportunity to also think about given that in many ways I think the sort of connection between audience and individuals is getting stronger how do we how do we actually help with that as opposed to treating all sources equally for all people which is just as sources to your preferred sources you should people keep saying that this is the bane of my existence naming my publication sources this is yeah good idea with that Alex if only I had a friend who knew how to name products yeah no I hear you on that I mean I do think that's the challenge for you guys right is the shift to pay a wall the shift to audio I would love to be able to ask Google hey what did Liz say about so-and-so in the last episode of Access and it give me like a snippet with a link to exactly where that was said right in the episode but not quite there yet but it sounds like that's the answer to one do more of that okay but also like let's say there's 20 interviews and that are all paywalled and Ellis is a description of one and he's asking something about what I said or somebody else said right like we should return we should make it easy to find the one that he can actually access and then maybe you all have to figure out how to make it easier if somebody doesn't want to buy the full subscription but they want partial I don't know we'll see micro payments hasn't really ever taken off but maybe that will change over time but I think I think there is an opportunity to make with personalization not to just do personalization and sort of small ranking twiddling but really strengthen these are the people you trust from let's make it easy for you with AI to access that information well Liz probably the next time I'll see you will be Google IO in a few months anything anything it's already coming up I'm sure you're already in rehearsals can you can you give us a tease what what what is next for for search and for Google this well I was going to say we are we are actively building but but what will make the this the stage will be an evolving thing over the next couple months but I think we're very excited across the company like I think as the tech unlocks new capabilities is also very weird because like traditionally you plan for IO like several months in advance and now you're at a time where you're like okay but like what happens if we figure out something in the tech April first right like are we gonna are we gonna ship it at IO or not so well we'll see how things bring us but I I look forward to seeing your IO I think there'll be lots of great news to share them that's gotta be so tough we had to do the same thing with the snap partner summit in the early years you know you're planning at five six months in advance and now it's like half the startups I work with are pivoting during our five week sprint because it's just so tough to stay on top of all the changes but but exciting like it's tough and incredibly exciting the fact that your pivoting is because something now is possible not because something now that you thought was possible is not right like that's and that's a that's a fun time to be in yeah all right loads thanks for joining us thank you appreciate it have a great day see you that's it for this week's show thank you Liz for coming on don't forget to like subscribe everywhere you get podcasts we are access dot show on the internet and you can find this in video at access pod on YouTube and if you like this episode please leave a five star review or thumbs up and share it with a friend it means a lot and you can find my newsletter at sources dot news for all your scoops you 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