Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…No, I mean I think it's interesting how organizations change. I think when you feel like there is a moment in time that is clearly critical to deliver for people, people are trying to get information from Google. We are not able to answer certain things or help people in certain ways and there's this technology that can do it, that creates urgency, and obviously there's lots of people building lots of things and the market's crazy and there's lots of things shipping all the time. There's a really exciting and healthy moment for us to build and build quickly and I think it's just exciting to be able to capture that opportunity because I think people believe, and I certainly believe that the next year or so of product is going to establish how people use the next wave of products for many years. And so at least I can only speak for myself, I feel this obligation to our users to give them the best version of Google that's powered by AI and that gives them the full knowledge of everything Google knows about the world and information to people and accessible with AI. That's driving a lot of the excitement. Yeah, it's such a good point that people are building their new habits. It's wild how many people just now rely on ChatGPT and how quickly that happened. And I could see Google being worried that, oh, shit, everyone's changing their habit from searching Google to searching ChatGPT. And the fact that now Gemini is number one. I was actually looking at the list of top, so in the top 15 apps, Google is I think five of them, a third. It's out of control, killing it. When people look at AI Mode versus ChatGPT or Claude or let's even say Perplexity, what's the way you think about the positioning of AI Mode versus these other tools? Is it trying to be a direct competitor or is it just like, "No, it's actually pretty different and here's what it's for?" Yeah, I mean AI Mode's a way to ask search anything you want. It's designed and specially created for information. And so really, it should give incredible helpful responses for the things that people come to Google for. Think about you're planning a trip, you're trying to buy something, you're working through a question for your research project. It needs information and that's really, it's less focused on things like creativity, although there's things that can do that are nice there. It can help you. Just like any kind of core AI product, you can ask it to rewrite something for you, it'll do that. But we are less focused on creativity, productivity, upload a spreadsheet and output graphs for me, we're not focused on that. We're really focused on what people use Google for, and making an AI for that so that you can come to Google, ask whatever you want and get effortless information about that and context and links to then also verify, dig in and go to the authoritative sources ultimately that people want, and we hear from people. So those ends up becoming the distinct qualities of this product versus more of a chatbot. Maybe you would talk to it like you maybe even have a bit of a, "Hey, how are you doing today," with that chatbot that we have some of that, we see that a little bit, but people are usually coming for information. They're trying to learn something and we focused our product on that.…

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