Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…And you have sources and links now embedded. Yeah, I believe, at least Liz said so, I actually didn’t notice it, but there’s ads in the AI overview also. I don’t think there’s ads in AI mode. When ads in AI mode, Sundar? When do you think…? Okay, we should say that in the nineties, I remember the animated GIFs, banner GIFs, that take you to some shady websites that have nothing to do with anything. AdSense revolutionized advertisement. It’s one of the greatest inventions in recent history because it allows us, for free, to have access to all these kinds of services. So ads fuel a lot of really powerful services. And at its best it’s showing you relevant ads, but also very importantly in a way that’s not super annoying, in a classy way. So when do you think it’s possible to add ads into AI mode and what does that look like from a classy, non-annoying perspective? Two things. Early part of AI mode, we’ll obviously focus more on the organic experience to make sure we are getting it right. I think the fundamental value of ads are- I think the fundamental value of ads are it enables access to deploy the services to billions of people. Second is ads are the reason we’ve always taken ads seriously is we view ads as commercial information, but it’s still information. So we bring the same quality metrics to it. I think with AI mode, to our earlier conversation about… I think AI itself will help us, over time, figure out the best way to do it. I think given we are giving context around everything, I think it’ll give us more opportunities to also explain, “Okay, here’s some commercial information.” Like today as a podcaster, you do it at certain spots, and you probably figure out what’s best in your podcast. I think so, there are aspects of that, but I think the underlying need of people value commercial information, businesses are trying to connect to users. All that doesn’t change in an AI moment, but look, we will rethink it. You’ve seen us in YouTube now do a mixture of subscription and ads. Like, obviously, we are now introducing subscription offerings across everything. So as part of that, the optimization point will end up being a different place as well.…

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