Sundar Pichai’s advice for Indian Engineers, AI and India, Wrapper Startups, and More!

Sund thank you so much for having me it's an absolute honor to be here I've seen so many Keynotes of yours right like through the screen and it's a fanboy moment for me to be here you know with you right across me and let me just get started right I think somebody here mentioned that this is AI Coachella and it felt like AI Coachella Madness right so many new things uh that came out the engineer and the Creator in me is super excited but I come from India and I feel

like you know it feels like this is an AI race and Silicon Valley is like moving really fast I feel you're sort of getting left behind if you were an engineer back home in India or you were an entrepreneur there what would you do to keep up well first of all uh good to talk to you Aron and congrats on uh a great Channel and the work you do look I see it a bit differently when I think about AI even as Google thinks about AI for us now India is one of our top markets right we have both for many of our products um it's our largest user base we have large teams in India so we've been thinking about AI in the context of India the second is unlike past Technologies the underlying apis for AI are available everywhere including India and I so I see developers already using it so I think India is a well positioned I think in terms of me I would what AI offers is for anyone to use it and solve build applications and solve problems so I think to me for India this is a moment India has an extraordinary base of developers engineering Talent so for them to understand this trend and build applications in a way that makes sense either for India or for the world from India I think both are exciting possibilities so I would view it that way from a Google perspective I'm excited because one of the things we are doing with AI is really breaking barriers I think the fact that all our new models are multimodal so they can reason across text images video so which means the way it'll come to India is you could be watching any video you want in any language even if that content was not didn't exist in your language or people who can just look at things and ask questions so that is the future so if anything I viewed as part of continuing to help digital India you know getting more and more people there comfortable with technology and giving them access to technology so I think it's huge and you were talking about

software Engineers right like I don't know if you know this but there's an entire industry in India built to help young Indians crack the Fang interview and you know these are generally very smart kids but unfortunately you know they're just glazing over the fundamentals and then Road learning data structures and algorithms I don't know if you've heard of this uh and now they see a big shift coming right Gemini can write code you have you'll have a pair programmer available pretty quickly uh do you have advice for these people how is it how do you get out of the competitive exam mindset with all these shifts coming about I think it's a great question uh I hope I think real success comes from understanding things in a deeper way right and and uh almost tempted to go back to the movie Three Idiots or something like that and like you know there's a scene in there I think when they ask Amir Khan the definition of a motor and like you know there is a there's a version you just describe what a motor is and there's a version where you actually understand what a motor is so I view it's the same way it quite doesn't change you have to you know understand the technology in a deeper way if you do you can transition you can do things programming languages may change the tools you use May evolve but you're understanding the stack in a much deeper way so that's what I would encourage people to do always uh programming is going to get easier in a way that's better right you know all of us are already thankful we don't have to write an assembly code or you know we are we used to higher level abstractions AI will help but even higher level abstractions you're going to use natural language you're going to tell sometime hey can you just debug this code for me and explain what happened and it'll do it just going to make you a better programmer so I think it's more important to you know go deeper rather than trying to like learn the thing of that moment yeah

interesting and you know I don't know if you spent time on Twitter like recently but a lot of people you know there's a word for startups being built on top of models like Gemini right uh it's kind of derogatory in nature uh it's called a rapper startup you've heard of rapper startups right you have thoughts on that like I feel like there if you build for use cases it should be commercially viable but would love to hear it from you there are going to be apis and people are going to use apis I think that is the way things will get build so you know it's not bad to be a wrapper just you shouldn't be a shallow wrapper where I think you have to think about where the models are going and make sure you aren doing something which just in the next version of the model will be done natively by the model itself got it that will have a short shelf life but if you're using AI to solve a real world use case in a way which involves a few more things you're doing or chaining multiple model chaining multiple models you know you have to think about the value you're adding on top of the model in whatever way chaining multiple things together and also thinking about the forward curve of the models and make sure the models just aren't going to do that so I think it's a combination of both of them yeah that's actually a very profound way to look at it right like the value on top of the model is what people will eventually pay for I

started a company this year it was called AOS and we're sort of like we were looking for problem statements right we said models are going to be dime or dozen some open source and you've actually contributed to open source quite a bit right uh and one of the things we realized and I don't know who to attribute this score to but hallucination seems to be a bug for things for tasks that require accuracy yeah but it seems to be a feature for Creative Endeavors and so slowly we found that even our client base uh sort of they wanted us to help them with creative Endeavors have you seen more Enterprise adoption by creative companies very much so right I think particularly as people are thinking about like take marketing campaigns for example we have good projects underway with like creative agencies advertising agencies where they actually want to push the frontier you know there are two ways you can imagine using it to just kind of take the mundane tasks and make it easier but there are also people who want these models to come up with things which otherwise they wouldn't have done and there you're exactly right I think Hallucination is a feature not a bug right and uh and that's the way I would think about these models uh for that purpose and if you go back to the alphao game there was a moment in which the model moved 37 I think yeah when it made that move which no human prior to it had done before right it was a creative intuitive way of uh playing the Go game and that's what you hope these models will do because they think in an unconstrained way so Google got into a

little bit of trouble recently with um you were generating historical characters with some racial inaccuracies now I feel like typically that should have stopped a company like Google or at least really slowed it down and it definitely has slowed down some of your competitors and no longer shipping like publicly usable products but I feel it's not stopped you this time and I feel um today everyone on the Internet is a Critic like even if you do your best work and you really put intent behind it and you're being transparent about everything people are complaining do you feel like just the number of people complaining on the internet has gone up and that's also given you air cover to sh boldly me we spoke about it last year at Google IO we fra you know we encapsulated as being bold and responsible and I think you know with a technology like that which is developing fast but it's still immature you have to ride the curve where you're pushing but you also be as responsible but there is some tradeoff and you're trying to find that optimal point but I think there's a lot of user excitement so that's what is guiding us to say people are ready for it right and you know we are rolling out AI overviews in search people are really embracing it and responding to it so I think you people are finding it helpful so that gives us the confidence that we are in the right direction and so which is why you see is moving fast but there'll be moments you know when we feel okay maybe this technology you know it's important to spend more time getting this right so we'll balance it but on the balance here we moving boldly

yeah I'm very long-term bullish on Google I think llms I mean a lot of this is going to get commoditized but uh you own the means to distribution YouTube Chrome Android so thank you so much for doing all you do and like I said it's been an honor well likewise on greatly enjoyed it thanks food in India what's your favorite food

well it's Bangalore uh I will probably get a Dosa uh it's my favorite food if it is Delhi a choli butra and if it's Mumbai I'll do a paji nice all right thank you so much