The history and future of AI at Google, with Sundar Pichai
Sundar Pichai joins John Collison and Elad Gil to discuss Google's historical and future AI roadmap, including why Google did not ship ChatGPT first despite inventing Transformers. They explore managing Alphabet's $180 billion CapEx budget amid power and memory bottlenecks, the evolution of Search into an agent manager, and long-term moonshots spanning robotics, quantum computing, and space-based data centers.
- Capital allocation at Alphabet has shifted from headcount tracking to granular machine learning compute budgeting. Read →
- Frontier models have created a massive intelligence overhang where model reasoning capacity vastly exceeds enterprise adoption. Read →
- Alphabet allocates parts of its capital plan, which touches a $180 billion CapEx budget, toward long-horizon bets that look marginal when conceived. Read →
- Google created Transformers and TPUs to fix internal bottlenecks in Search and translation rather than build a standalone chatbot. Read →
- Alphabet projects its 2026 capital expenditures between $175 billion and $185 billion, primarily directed at computing infrastructure. Read →