Google CEO Sundar Pichai: AI’s Infinite Possibilities, Compute Scarcity Dilemmas, Future AI Products

Alex Kantrowitz (0:00)

This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis Chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, Head of Enterprise Business Solutions at Voya Financial to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today.

It's never been more challenging to get front to your compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay?

Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razor were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network slash alex for free consultation. That's akash.network slash alex for free consultation.

Sundar Pichai (1:03)

We are at early stages of the most consequential technology ever. This is not like fiber, it's not dark, we are using it.

Alex Kantrowitz (1:09)

AI researchers, for them, it's like the bigger the computer, the better the AI. You give the researchers the biggest possible computer, even if it is to the detriment of today's profits like the cloud business.

Sundar Pichai (1:22)

The compute we have today is a function of decisions I made in 2024 Today, obviously, when you sit and look at anything, everyone is short, not just us, other companies and everyone wishes you had 2x of what you had planned for.

Alex Kantrowitz (1:40)

Where's Google's Muse or its DOTS product?

Sundar Pichai (1:44)

Users, both in consumer and enterprise, will have access to some multi-agent framework for them, working all the time, doing things. And so, it feels like a moment of infinite possibilities.

Alex Kantrowitz (1:57)

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai joins us to talk about Google's plan to compete on the frontier of AI, the balance between cutting-edge AI research and the company's cloud business, and what the future of the interface looks like. And Sundar is here with us in studio in Mountain View today. Sundar, great to see you. Welcome to the show.

Sundar Pichai (2:15)

Thanks, Alex. Great to be here.

Alex Kantrowitz (2:17)

So Google is back on the frontier with Gemini 4 Argon. In plain speak, that means it is a world-leading model, its benchmark breaking, it beats OpenAI and Anthropics public models on a variety of benchmarks, including on coding, math, science, and knowledge work.

Now, the conventional wisdom had been that Google had basically given up on the frontier, that it was going to make these fast models that were good enough and use them in its products, and it wasn't pursuing frontier AI anymore. But that was wrong.

Sundar Pichai (2:50)

I mean, very wrong. Look, I think we are so committed to being at the frontier. I think it's in our DNA. We won't do it any other way.

We've been thinking about the AI frontier for well over a decade now.

We definitely, the frontier is very dynamic. It's very competitive. It's very exciting. I couldn't be more pleased with how Argon has come together. We took our time with it. We made sure we tested it safely and deployed it carefully. We took a bit longer than our other models, given its capabilities. But I think across the board, be it for agentic work, knowledge work, coding, creative tasks. I think Argon is one of the really good frontier models. And in the first 72 hours since we launched, it's almost up to 25 trillion tokens used, which is about 3X what Gemini 3 had in the first 72 hours. So, and we are capacity constrained as we are serving it. So excited, but there are always areas, you know, both the frontiers just last.

It's very dynamic and you have to keep evolving the models. And there are areas which we can see we need to improve as well. So we'll be at work on all of that as well.

Alex Kantrowitz (4:21)

Which areas?

Sundar Pichai (4:23)

Look, on any given model, you know, Argon will be across the board better at everything if you just look even two months back. But the space is so evolving.

But even on coding, for example, there are areas, pockets where we know we need to do better. And, you know, there's clear feedback, and so we'll make it better.

Alex Kantrowitz (4:51)

Let me at least make the argument for why standard models might be good enough for Google. I'm gonna channel what people say about this.