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Fasten your seat belt again? Google search will continue to change profoundly in 2025, according to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet/Google, interviewed at the New York Times DealBook Summit in 2024.
Google search in 2025. Generally elusive on substance and details, here is Pichai’s quote:
- “Research itself will continue to change profoundly [2025]. I think we will be able to tackle more complex questions than ever before. I think you will be surprised even at the beginning [2025] the kind of newer things that research can do versus what it is today.
Pichai said the company is applying AI most aggressively in research:
- “Gaps in research quality [were] all based on transformers. Internally we call it BERT and MUM and you know we made search multimodal, search quality improvements. We were improving the linguistic understanding of research. That’s why we build transformers in the company.
- “If you look at the last couple of years, with the AI insights, Gemini is used by over a billion users just in search. I just feel like we’re getting started.
Why we care. Research has changed profoundly since the rise of generative AI in late 2022. In April 2023, Pichai said research would continue to evolve significantly over the next decade and, earlier this year, said research would continue to evolve into Search Generative Experience, the predecessor to AI Insights. .
Content flood. In a world where you’re inundated with so much content, Pichai says Google Search becomes even more valuable:
- “If anything, I think something like research becomes more valuable. In a world where you are flooded with content, you try to find trustworthy content. Content that is meaningful to you reliably, you can use. I think it becomes more valuable.
- “…Look, information is the essence of humanity. We have followed a curve when it comes to information. When Facebook came along, people had a whole new way to get information. YouTube Facebook… I can go on and on. I think the problem with a lot of these constructs is that they are zero-sum in their inherent perspective. They just feel like people consume information in a certain limited way and they all share that information with each other. But that’s not the reality of what people do.
Traffic and fair use. There was also an interesting exchange where the interviewer, Andrew Ross Sirkin, tried to push Pichai on whether Google was providing enough credit and traffic to content creators. Pichai clearly had nothing to say about the search side, so he pivoted to focus on YouTube creators rather than websites. Here are these exchanges:
Sorkin: You have more content than anyone… The value of that content. You have my emails on Gmail. This is the case if I uploaded a video or if someone else uploaded a video about me to YouTube. I’m sure people have copied and pasted articles I wrote or other things. How should we think about this and its value. You know, it’s very interesting because if you were to write a book, you could go to the library and maybe read 30 books. Maybe you could go and buy some more books and you could take all this information in your head and hopefully footnote it or put it in the bibliography. But you’ll probably only be able to do this once. It would be very difficult for you to take all the information and learn it and then spit it out a million times. You can spit it out a million times a day. I’m just wondering what the economics of this should be for those who created it in the first place.
Pichai: …While it’s often debated, we spend a lot of time thinking about the traffic we send into the ecosystem. Even during the transition of the last two years. This is an important priority for us.
…I think there will always be a balance between understanding what fair use is when a new technology comes along and how to give back value commensurate with the value of the intellectual property – the hard work that people have put in.
Sorkin: But do you think there should be different rules regarding fair use in the AI era?
Pichai: Look, these are important issues that I’m sure Congress and the Supreme Court and everyone will be involved in.
Sorkin: I think they will, but if they do, they will be late. That’s the problem, right? It has already passed us by. So all this information was collected and people learned from it. And to the extent that some people use your services and other services, they benefit. But it is not clear at this time whether the original creator is the beneficiary.
Content License. The conversation then turned to the future of the “blue link economy,” with Sorkin wondering if Google would send “checks to creators who created even one idea or fact that you may have collect along the way?
Pichai emphasized that this was content licensed from Reddit, the Associated Press and the New York Times. But it’s clear that Google doesn’t license all the content it “sucks up.” Here is that exchange:
Sorkin: … Do you see a day when, instead of the Blue Link economy, if you will, you will send checks to the creators who created even one idea or fact that you were able to collect along the way ?
Pichai: I mean at the end of the day, we’re licensing AI content today. We do it where we see value.
Sorkin: …One of the things fascinates me. For example, you get licensed data from Reddit, right? But what’s so interesting is that people on Reddit simply write for free. It’s a fascinating business model.
Pichai: Look, we license data from Reddit. We license data from AP. We license data from The New York Times. We do this around the world in different ways. But I think over time, will there be templates that people can create by? There will be a market in the future, I think. There will be creators who create for AI models or something like that and get paid for it. I really think you know this is part of the future and people will understand it.
The video. Building the Future: Sundar Pichai on AI, Regulation, and What’s Next for Google (New York Times Events on YouTube).