Sundar Pichai: belief

Transcript context

…That said, the competition is heating up. You’ve been friendly with Elon even though, technically, he’s a competitor, but you’ve been friendly with a lot of tech CEOs, in that way, just showing respect towards them and so on. What do you think about the Robotaxi efforts that Tesla is doing? Do you see it as competition? What do you think? Do you like the competition? We are one of the earliest and biggest backers of SpaceX as Google, right? So thrilled with what SpaceX is doing and fortunate to be investors as a company there, right? We don’t compete with Tesla directly. We are not making cars, et cetera, right? We are building L4, 5 autonomy. We are building a Waymo driver, which is general purpose and can be used in many settings. They’re obviously working on making Tesla self-driving too. I’ve just assumed it’s a de facto that Elon would succeed in whatever it does. So that is not something I question, but I think we are so far from… These spaces are such vast spaces. Like, I think about transportation, the opportunity space, the Waymo driver is a general purpose technology we can apply in many situations. So you have a vast green space in all future scenarios, I see Tesla doing well and Waymo doing well. Like we mentioned with the Neolithic package, I think it’s very possible that in the “AI package” when the history is written, autonomous vehicles, self-driving cars is like the big thing that changes everything. Imagine, over a period of a decade or two, just the complete transition from manually-driven to autonomous, in ways we might not predict, it might change the way we move about the world completely. So the possibility of that and then the second and third order effects, as you’re seeing now with Tesla, very possibly, would see some… Internally, with Alphabet, maybe Waymo, maybe some of the Gemini robotics stuff, it might lead you into the other domains of robotics because we should remember that Waymo is a robot.…

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