Lenny Rachitsky: prediction

Transcript context

…I think there's an opportunity for these to come closer together. I think that's what AI Mode represents, at least for the core AI experiences, but I think of them is very complimentary to the core search product. You should be able to not have to think about where you're asking a question ultimately, you just go to Google. Today, if you put in whatever you want, we're actually starting to use much of the power behind AI Mode right in AI Overviews. So you can just ask really hard, you could put a five sentence question right into Google search. You can try it and then it should trigger AI at the top. It's a preview, and then you can go deeper into AI Mode and have this back and forth. So that's how these things connect. Same for your camera. So if you take a picture of something, "What's this plant?" Or, "How do I buy these shoes?" It should take you to an AI little preview. And then if you go deeper, again, it's powered by AI Mode. You can have that back and forth, so you shouldn't have to think about that. It should feel like a consistent simple product experience ultimately, but obviously this is a new thing for us, and so we wanted to start it in a way that people could use and give us feedback with something like a direct entry point like google.com/ai. I recently had Brian Balfour on the podcast and he showed this quote that's really stuck with me that I think about as you talk about all this, it was by Alex Rampell, this idea that startups is a game of getting distribution before incumbents can innovate fast enough. And it feels like you guys are finally there where it's like, "Oh man, now here comes Google." I don't know if I have a question here, but it just feels like there's been all this time for people to find distribution, and now it's like, okay, now Google is coming. What we found is that people are asking these questions in Google. They're trying to get this out of Google. And so if you can just have an AI that's powerful enough to answer a really hard calculation someone's trying to figure out, or take a picture of multiple choice homework question for a chemistry question, people are doing this. And so now that you have this really sophisticated AI that's based on our frontier models, we can just handle increasingly more and more stuff for people and so hopefully that's the more natural on ramp here. And then we just need to make it easy enough for people to use, because these are new products, and people are used to using Google in a specific way. They type in keywords, we call it sometimes keyword ease, but you can actually use natural language in Google. That's the biggest shift. We're seeing people asking real long, hard, complex questions. You just don't think, "Oh, I can go to Google and type in what's a great place for a date night? I already went to these four restaurants. I'm looking for outdoor dining and my friend has this allergy." You could put that into Google. And I think that's the kind of thing that we're excited to continue to make easy for people.…

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