
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview
Fri, 16 May 2025
(0:00) David Friedberg welcomes Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai (2:58) Will AI kill search?: Google disrupting itself, evolving search to follow the user (15:32) Infrastructure advantage, foundational model differentiation (25:08) Future of human-computer interaction, hardware, competitive landscape in AI (35:29) Energy constraints in AI (41:20) Google's progress in quantum computing and robotics (47:56) Culture, coddling, and talent recruitment in the age of AI (56:50) Does he consider Alphabet a holding company searching for Google's next $100B business? Follow Sundar: https://x.com/sundarpichai Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect
Chapter 1: Who is Sundar Pichai and what is his role at Alphabet?
We're sitting here at the Googleplex with the CEO of Alphabet, Sundar. Thanks for being here.
Great to have you here, David. Look forward to it.
Chapter 2: Is AI disrupting Google's core search business?
Is Google at risk of being truly disrupted from AI?
Chapter 3: What is Google's strategy for evolving search with AI?
Recently, we are testing it in labs, this whole new dedicated AI experience called AI Mode coming to Search.
OpenAI has SAM, XAI has Elon, Meta has Zuck, Microsoft has Satya. Are you willing to kind of share your perspectives on those four competitors?
I think maybe only one of them has invited me to a dance, not the others. Biggest regret? Look, there are acquisitions we debated hard, came close. Just give me one name. We're going to get in trouble. Maybe Netflix. We just leaned into the user experience. And over time, we figured out monetization to follow.
It's like one of the original principles of Google. Follow the user. All else will follow.
I'm going all in.
All right, besties. I think that was another epic discussion. People loved the interviews. I could hear him talk for hours. Absolutely. We crushed your questions. Admit it. We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What did you guys think? That was fun. Power. I'm really excited for this conversation. You and I started working at Google on the same day in 2004.
I didn't quite realize that.
We were both in the same time. Same Noogler class. We had the hats on that same week on the Friday All Hands. I'm now a podcaster. You've done a little bit differently.
You're more than a podcaster, but you're very good at podcasting too.
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Chapter 4: How does Google's infrastructure advantage support AI innovation?
So to me, you don't think about it as a dilemma because users, you have to innovate to stay ahead and you kind of lean in that direction.
It's like one of the original principles of Google, follow the user, all else will follow. Yeah, there you go. The Google is dead disruptor narrative has, as you point out, been kind of repeated a number of times. Today, people are pointing specifically, and I appreciate your points about there's new search experiences coming. The search experience, it sounds like, is going to evolve.
As people look at standalone apps, they compare Gemini as a standalone app to ChatGPT, to the Meta experience, the stats that came out in the recent court testimony that had some data revealed from March. I don't know where the data came from, but it said the Gemini AI app had 350 million monthly users compared to ChatGPT at 600 and Meta AI at 500.
Is that the wrong way to think about it, that the Gemini standalone app isn't the future or the AI bet that Google's making? But it sounds like there's going to be much more of a kind of timed out integration into how the search experience evolves. And what happens to Gemini?
You know, in search, you know, Maybe the most widely used in AI product today might be search with AI overviews, right? People are using it intensely. Obviously, we have a standalone Gemini app. I think we are making progress there, particularly with the introduction of Gemini 2.5 Pro. We have seen a real uptake and engagement and usage growth in the product.
We have a lot more to come just in the last, Few weeks, we have shipped deep research and updated Canvas, audio overviews. You can now go and do video generation with VO2 straight in the Gemini app on Android phones with Gemini Live. You can screen share. It can talk to what's on your screen. So there's a lot coming that way, and users are responding.
Look, ChatGPT has obviously had phenomenal success, but I think it's still early days and we are definitely seeing traction, seeing growth. To me, what matters is if you innovate, are users responding and using it more? That seems to be the case. It's in our hands to continue innovating. I think it's a fiercely competitive moment.
But I would say across our products, people are coming and using and consuming information across search, using the Gemini model increasingly, in YouTube, in the Gemini app and so on. So I think it's a much broader view we have.
If I were to think about the unit economics of Google's business, there's a cost to serve a search query and there's revenue per search query, ad revenue per search query. How is that number changing or how will that change in this kind of evolution and search towards more of an AI interface? Because I've got to assume that to serve an AI driven query is much more expensive.
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Chapter 5: What is the future of human-computer interaction with AI?
So a lot of it is to power the innovations from Google DeepMind, pushing the frontier. And we're doing it across many dimensions, not just large language models, but even there doing it across not just text, images, video, et cetera, building world models, right?
So there's just a lot of innovation which we are pushing on the frontier, obviously to support our core products like Search, YouTube, Gemini, et cetera. But 50% of the compute goes to its Google Cloud.
Let's just talk about chips for a second. This is a big part of the conversation, is NVIDIA's got the real market monopoly in AI, is what everyone says. Do TPUs provide a wholesale replacement for your need for NVIDIA in the supply chain, or is NVIDIA still a core part of the mix in the data center for training versus inference in LLMs versus other models?
Maybe just share your understanding of where the mix evolves to for you guys.
Look, first of all, at a high level, NVIDIA is a phenomenal company. Jensen is awesome. We have been working with NVIDIA now for a very, very long time, and we continue to do so. And we serve a lot of the Gemini traffic on GPUs as well. And so we give customers choice, et cetera. Internally, we train our Gemini models on TPUs, and we serve it that way across our products. But we use both.
And I do think, look, I do think everyone in the industry is going to try and do something like that. But, you know, it's, you know, NVIDIA is R&D and their ability to drive that innovation. Their software stack is world class. So, you know, they have a lot of advantages as a company and I have extraordinary respect for them.
But we've always had, we are committed, we are actually deploying GPUs internally as well. I think I like that flexibility, but we are also long-term committed to the TPU direction as well. So I think it's a good combination to have both. And I think we push each other and drive the frontier forward.
Just going back, so there's an infrastructure advantage inherent in all of the investment that's been made for 20 plus years and the continued investment. A lot of folks have said that some of the performance in foundational LLMs is kind of starting to plateau. And as a result, we're seeing a less kind of differentiated landscape amongst the competitors. And that's
should be a consideration for Google. That's the outside kind of narrative. Can you share a little bit about, and then I want to come back to non-LLM models where there's other advantages for Google in a minute, but maybe just on this point, how much more of an opportunity to continue to evolve LLMs is there?
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Chapter 6: How does Google view competition from other AI leaders and companies?
Chapter 7: What are the challenges and opportunities in AI-related hardware and chips?
And we've actually seen for a given query, the cost to serve that query has fallen dramatically in an 18-month timeframe. What is probably more of a constraint is latency, I would say. So it's less the cost per query. I think our ability to serve the experience at the right latency, search has been near instant. So how do you think about that frontier has been more of a question.
The cost per query is not what I think will end up, you know, I think we'll be able to, we've done the transition well. That's not a primary driver of how it'll impact things, yeah.
And do you have a point of view on ad revenue per AI query?
You know, we already with AI overviews, you know, we are at the baseline of, you know, it's the same as without AI overviews. And so we've reached that stage. But from there, we can improve, right? And I think... I've always felt the reason ads have worked well in search is because commercial information is also information.
People, when they have that intent, are looking for that most relevant information. I don't see any reason why AI, just from a first principle standpoint, why won't AI do a better job there as well? And so I think we are comfortable that we can work the transition through. Some of it may take time, but all indicators are that we'll be able to do it well. Over time. Over time.
But it's already AI overviews. When we show ads, we've kind of reached the baseline.
Do you feel that pressure on Wall Street and the board? What's the tension that you feel as a leader in trying to manage this transition on the product, on the revenue model. For an organization of this scale, I don't know how many leaders have done it successfully in the history of business. Where do you feel the tension? Where do you feel the pressure?
And how much leeway are you being given by the founders and the board to do what's needed here?
Two things. I mean, the main, it's a moment of acceleration, right? So if anything, The good thing about these moments is you don't even have a lot of time to think about some of those questions. I think a lot about making sure we have the best models. We are pushing the frontier as a company, and I think the last few months have shown the breadth and range of what we are doing.
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Chapter 8: How is Google managing culture and talent recruitment in the AI era?
you know, audio, vision, language, all of that, and be there in your line of view. So I think when AR really works, I think that'll wow people. I'm not talking about immersive displays, I'm talking more about AR glasses, right? And I think that paradigm looks very interesting to me having used it. You can kind of feel that next leap, right, where I think we'll all enjoy using it in a way.
but you still have a little bit of system integration challenges to work through. So we have maybe a couple cycles away to get to that sweet spot, what smartphones were in around 2006, 2007. So, but maybe that's the next leap, right? And so probably that's what's exciting for me.
Are you spending a lot of time on hardware?
Yes, right, I think. We are definitely excited about, be they our glasses, the next form factors, you know, Robotics is another area, all that. And we obviously build Pixel phones. We build vast data centers. So we are definitely in the physical world. You can think of Waymo as a big robot. We are driving around everywhere. So we're making, with our partners, cars that way. So definitely, yes.
I just want to zoom out and look at, there's this competitive landscape that's emerged for Google that maybe it's always been challenging. Maybe there's always been competitors, but... They're getting a lot of money and they're investing a lot of money, more than ever, to compete with Google. How have the founders of Google, I've seen both of them recently, sounds like Sergey's spending time here.
They both independently shared with me that this is the most exciting thing they've ever seen in computer science and it's transforming everything. How engaged are they? How much time do you spend with them? And what's your relationship like there?
They are obviously fortunate to have both of them involved in their own unique ways deeply. I talk to them all the time. I think both Larry and Sergey, credit to them. They always envision where AI would be. I think their ability to understand trends and You know, I swear I've had conversations maybe as early as like 15, 20 years ago about moments like this with them.
I think they both would argue that this is the most exciting time in the field, you know, and they both engage in their own ways. I think Sergey is definitely spending time with the Gemini team in a pretty hardcore way, like sitting and coding and spending time with the engineers.
And that gives the energy to the team, which I think it's unparalleled to have a founder sitting there looking at loss curves, giving feedback on model architectures. How can we improve post-training, et cetera? I think it's a rare, rare place to be. But my favorite conversations are sometimes when the three of us sit and talk. The combination of, I mean, they're very non-linear thinkers.
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