John Collison: prediction

Transcript context

…But the way I internalize these moments is if you're in consumer internet, you're going to have surprises. We were at Google when, Elad and I, there was something called Google Video Search. YouTube came out. Just that we acquired YouTube. Or think about if you were in Facebook, Instagram came out. Nobody sits and says… You don't look at those moments with that drama because Facebook just bought Instagram. But the way I've internalized is consumer internet, 3 people are going to be sitting and prototyping and throwing out millions of things. I'm not trying to diminish anything, but I'm just saying you're always going to have these moments. I don't think people wake up in a garage and ship a better iPhone. That's not going to happen. But that's not how consumer internet is. You just have to be conscious of that and to internalize that. As I think about the AI race in 2026, one thing that strikes me is Google has for so long had speed as the place it tries to differentiate. Original Google Search was really fast and famously displayed the search query time within the results, sort of showing off. Then Gmail Fast Search compared to the competitors of the time, or Chrome, compared to the competitors of the time. And now, I use all of the AI services for different things, but Gemini on TPUs is just so fast. I'm curious how much this is part of the explicit product strategy and how you think of it, or it's much more nuanced than that. I've always internalized speed. Let's call it latency for this purpose, and as one of the distinguishing features of a great product. Also, it almost always reflects the technical underpinnings of the product having been done well. There's a different speed which matters, too, which is the speed of shipping and iteration and release cycles. Both are important. But you talk about latency. It's easy to say you want latency, but you're constantly adding capabilities. The capability frontier is progressing. There's some sense of, how do you balance that? That's where it gets more complicated. But to give an example, like Search, I was speaking with the teams. They now have for sub-teams, latency budgets in the milliseconds. You get 50% credit... If you ship something which shaves off 3 milliseconds, you earn 1. 5 milliseconds for your latency budget, and 1.5 milliseconds gets passed on to the user. Depending on what we think you're doing, some people may get a latency budget of 30 milliseconds or 10 milliseconds. You can use it, but you have rigorous reviews against that. But that's how much we think it matters.…

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