Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Google and Alphabet. He sits down with John and Elad Gil to discuss Google’s resurgence in the AI race, managing a massive $180 billion CapEx budget, and why 2026 is the year of the supply crunch. They cover the constraints of memory and power, why he believes the US economy will grow significantly due to AI, and the internal cultural shift back to &quot;Googley&quot; optimism. Sundar also shares details on long-term bets like data centers in space, why he wishes he had funded Waymo even faster, and the small thing inside Google that still ignites his passion for building. Timestamps (00:00:18) The history of Google and AI (00:05:17) Speed and Search (00:12:12) Google’s AI comeback (00:27:03) Stripe network intelligence (00:27:53) Bottlenecks (00:41:25) Capital allocation (01:00:44) How Google works

The history and future of AI at Google, with Sundar Pichai

Cheeky Pint

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Cheeky Pint

## Participants

- **John** (Stove Leg Media)
- **Elad Gil** (None)
- **Sundar Pichai** (Google / Alphabet)

## Transcript

[SPEAKER_01] Sundar Pichai just passed a decade as CEO of Google. Alphabet is now not only one of the world's biggest tech companies, but a leader in the AI race, with plans to spend $175 billion in CapEx in 2026.

[SPEAKER_00] Cheers. Cheers. Thanks for coming.

[SPEAKER_01] Well, thanks for having me. A bit of history that people talk about a lot in the context of Google and AI is the fact that transformers were invented at Google, but then productized outside of Google with mostly ChatGPT and kind of that style of product. How do you reflect on that now?

[SPEAKER_00] I think it's actually worth talking about. It's a bit misunderstood. Transformers was done in the context of a lot of TPUs, transformers were all done to solve a specific product need to some extent, right? Like the team's thinking about how to make translation better. In the case of TPUs, how do you, hey, speech rec works, but you suddenly have to serve it to 2 billion people. We don't have enough chips for it. It's like, how do you solve inference for it? I hadn't known that. Transformers were specifically...

[SPEAKER_00] It was from our research teams, right? But they were guided by solving product problems. And transformers were immediately used. So Bert and Mom, people underestimate how much, because we measure search quality so religiously, some of the biggest jumps in search quality in that period where search went ahead of everyone else was because of Bert and Mom.

[SPEAKER_00] We built transformers and used it immediately in search to improve language understanding, understanding web pages, understanding your queries, kept building better models. We had also started productizing it internally in the form of there were teams building something called Lambda. So, obviously, we weren't the first to ship that. But I think it's less to do with like, it was just research and we weren't applying it in a product direction. That I think is just...

[SPEAKER_01] It's like, you did this research, you then saw massive ROI from using it the way you intended. And then you didn't invent all of the products that were invented with it, but that's to be expected.

[SPEAKER_00] I would go a step further. We exactly even conceived the product, which is like ChatGP. It was Lambda. You know, if you would remember, there was an engineer inside who thought it was sentient, right? So think of it as an early version of ChatGPT you were speaking to internally. So we even had the product version of it in the multiverse somewhere else. Google probably shipped that nine months later or something like that.

[SPEAKER_00] Maybe the... In fact, in the Google I.O. in 22, we launched something called AI Test Kitchen and that was Lambda, but we had constrained it because internally we didn't have an end-to-end version which was RL achieve...

The history and future of AI at Google, with Sundar Pichai

Transcript

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Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
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The history and future of AI at Google, with Sundar Pichai

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.