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John Collison: belief

7 Apr 2026 Cheeky Pint The history and future of AI at Google, with Sundar Pichai

“I think what Elad is getting at is a feeling where I saw a tweet go by that someone was saying, "What you have to realize to explain what's currently going on in the Valley is that every tech executive has severe AI psychosis right now, and is spending a huge amount of time writing code and talking to AI and things like that.”

— John Collison

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Speaker
John Collison
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
7 Apr 2026
Publisher
Cheeky Pint

Transcript context

…That doesn't make sense to me. I think some of it is, if you're a younger company, or you are more a pure research lab, you may be headquartered in San Francisco. There are a lot of small attributes which can probably make a difference. But I don't think at a foundational level, there is a difference in outlook on what the curve is or how we internalize the technology. Look, I think even within the company, there's a set of us living on the bleeding edge, firing agents, seeing what these things can do, see the agents pick up skills, do stuff, and also look back three months ago, what they could do now. We are living that exponential internally. I think you're both right, where I agree, you can point us the history of Google. I think what Elad is getting at is a feeling where I saw a tweet go by that someone was saying, "What you have to realize to explain what's currently going on in the Valley is that every tech executive has severe AI psychosis right now, and is spending a huge amount of time writing code and talking to AI and things like that. " I thought that was a funny take and not without any truth to it. I'm curious, what were your feeling the AGI moments along the way of the recent... Or to what extent do you have AI psychosis these days? My first feeling the AGI moment was 2012 when Jeff Dean demoed the earliest version of Google Brain. This is when the neural networks recognized a cat. That was 2012. I went with Larry to the DARPA Challenge. It might have been 2014, I think. I need to be exact about when we went there, seeing the cars drive there. Demis demoing the earliest versions of the models, having what we would call as imagination. There have been many moments like that, so it was obvious that technology is progressing. In terms of living now and having a visceral feel for it, I think the closest, I would say, is if you're coding, and you give it a complex task, and you never open the ID, and you're in some agent manager world, and you see it do it, and how powerful it is. You can call it feel the AGI. There are moments like that.…

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