Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…I would be shocked. Yeah. This as a product is not going to pay for itself, but the data asset has stayed really strong. People still use Waze all the time. Many Uber drivers are using it and preferring it to Google Maps. In developing countries it’s used way more often because the crowdsourced data is way more accurate. So as those countries really start to come online, their default experience is Waze, it will be not great for Google if that was out of their hands. I think that that combined with Google’s autonomous vehicle future and the great data that it develops, that creates for itself, for its use and its own app, and it feeds into Google Maps, I’m going to go A- only because the A’s that we’ve given out are just like widely successful on a ridiculously fast scale. To me, it's almost like in some ways this is… I’m going to give it a grade but how I really feel, and I know this is a cop-out in some “ways,” it's too early to tell like even though this happened three years ago and it's too early to tell because just like three years ago and this whole Waze story I feel like was really the closing chapter of the mobile platform “wars”. You know, what’s happened since then, we're now at the emerging of the era of machine learning is really the important thing in technology like went from, you know, Google’s being very open and saying this about themselves, but we went from a world, call it 10 years ago, where companies were internet first companies. We weren’t software companies. We were internet companies to from 10 to 5 years ago, the world shifted to mobile first companies. Companies aren’t just internet. They’re mobile and they’re not spilling desktop websites, but now, we’re shifting to a machine learning-based. Companies are ML first. Google is very explicit. We are an ML first company now.” And you see that across all of our products with Google Brain, with Maps, with TensorFlow and the first, I think, like huge native ML application that industry that’s going to happen is probably autonomous vehicles.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.