Google CEO Sundar Pichai says AI search will actually help the web

On this special episode of Decoder, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sat down with Nilay Patel this week following the company's I/O developer conference to talk about the state of AI, the major changes rolling out now to Google Search, and the future of the web.

00:00 - Intro
00:22 - Language vs intelligence
04:06 - Future of Google Search
07:31 - "Google Zero" & website decline
10:11 - AI Overviews
14:15 - OpenAI's Sora & fair use training
17:09 - Compensating creators for content
21:45 - The rise of AI spam
25:02 - Testing AI Overviews in Google Search
30:31 - Multimodal search & competing with OpenAI
32:47 - Solving AI hallucinations
35:57 - What the web looks like in 5 years

[TheVerge]

Is the web the final boss that Google has been working its way up to killing all along?

[madhavagrawal]

Nilay cooked. He always asks ceos challenging questions. But this one was crazy. Kinda hard to see Sundar struggle so much. But thank you Nilay we need more journalists like you

[ahrens]

Appreciate nilay being okay with asking real questions!!

[SleepyPossums]

You asked some hard questions! He seemed sincerely unsure how to answer a lot of them. Pichai seems completely committed to this current path, which I’m not sold on yet.

Great interview, full of great insights.

[Spo]

Surprisingly weighty questions for a level of CEO that’s usually surrounded by a PR buffer. Good stuff.

[thenormalone]

Giving the CEO of Google your own phone to show him that Google Search is flawed was a move I didn't expect haha

[Petrolhead]

Nilay should do all the CEO interviews. Kudos to Sundar for answering all the questions honestly rather than avoiding.

[harshavardhanvenkatasaikot]

Out of all the pichai’s interviews this one feels different and honest.

[_____case]

Remember kids, there's no such thing as "searching the web". You're only ever searching some company's indexed corpus of the web's content.

Edit: Lots of people in the comments are either not understanding my point (that censorship is inherent in how search engines work), or they believe this point is so obvious that it's not worth stating, which seems naive to me.

[tantoun]

It seems the job of a CEO is to find the best non answer to every question

[BAMiiN]

Nice questions, finally an interview that wasn't catered to make the interviewee look good. The answers on the other hand weren't that nice, seems like Sundar didn't even have a straight answer in the first place for many of them.

[rintintin_]

07:01 wow the answer that Sundar gave to Nilay was really just ‘this is the end of an era’.

[MMMM-vhwl]

Nilay did a great job asking tough questions without excessively grilling Sundar to the point where he became defensive, although his answers to many questions weren't great, the interview itself was conducted well.

[joghaella]

Thanks to the Verge team for adding the slides for the referenced articles in the video!

[JacobWoods]

Great interviewing. It’s important that these companies get grilled

[issiewizzie]

Great hard interview .... great work team

[unquestionabletv]

Interview Tim and Craig again after WWDC please

[JuniorTobias]

15 mins in and bro is asking BANGER questions, between this and the apple Vision... tells me the verge has NO fear lmao

[leafhurricane]

After a loooong time watching a real interview!

[stevendecoeyer]

Really good interview; excellent questions!!