Hard Fork - Our Field Trip to Google I/O + A Sit-Down With Sundar Pichai + System Update

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

This week, we headed to Mountain View, Calif., for the annual developer event Google I/O. We share our reactions to Google’s biggest announcements, including a revamped search box, new agentic tools that compete with OpenClaw and an updated flash model of Gemini that the company says is faster than competitors. Then, we ask Sundar Pichai, the company’s chief executive, how he’s responding to growing evidence that the public is souring on A.I., what advice he’d give to college grads frightened by the current job market and where the company stands relative to competitors in the A.I. race. Finally, we run through the other big tech headlines of the week in our segment System Update. Guest: Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google. Additional Reading: Google Changes Its Search Box for the First Time in 25 Years How Google Is Starting to Win the A.I. Race Elon Musk Loses $150 Billion Suit Against OpenAI and Sam Altman Before Mass Layoffs, Meta Reassigns 7,000 Workers to Focus on A.I. Pope to Launch Encyclical on AI Alongside Anthropic Co-Founder Was a Story That Just Won a Literary Prize A.I.-Generated? Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I. We want to hear from you. Email us at [e-mail]. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Casey, I couldn't help but notice that during much of the IOC keynote, you were on your phone playing Bellotro and doing emails on your laptop. Well, you know, when you have your agent recording the entire thing and transcribing it for you, you can just, you know, sort of glance up every few seconds and see if a news event is happening. It's actually really amazing the future we're living in. This is the promise of AGI. Soon we will be able to play Blatro wherever we are. You can pay attention to nothing and be fine. Welcome to the future. I'm Kevin Ruse and Tech columnist at the New York Times.

I'm Casey Noon from Platformer. And this is hard for it. This week. It's our annual field trip to Google I.O. We have all the big news plus our conversation with Google CEO Sundar Pachai. And then some other highlights from the week with our system update. You know I told that to install last night, but it didn't. Did you delay it?

Yeah. You're always doing that. Well, Kevin, the keynote just wrapped up here at I.O. 2026. What did you think? Yes. this is like the Coachella of capitalism, the warp tour of the web,

a lalapalooza of links. I can keep going. Please don't. And they are doing a lot. We heard about everything from like agenic search to these new like video editing models and products that they have, all the way to Demis Asabas at the end of the keynote declaring that we are in the first.

foothills of the singularity. When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity. I love that Google's version of the Steve Jobs, like, one more thing, is like, one more thing, the singularity. A great way to end. So, yeah, what was your standout? What did they announce that caught your eye?

I mean, they have said that they just made the biggest change to search in 25 years. I think time will tell if that is truly as significant, it changes they're suggesting, because when we saw it in the demos, it just looked like the box grows if you type more into it. But, you know, they're also saying that by this summer, they're going to be generating custom user interfaces based on your query and a bunch of other stuff.

I think, like, a through line through everything that they discussed here was coming this summer or coming to a group of trusted testers. And with these kind of, like, productivity tools, walls until they're in your hands, you don't really know if anything has changed in your life or not. Yeah, there was a lot of focus on agentic stuff like agentic coding. They have this new agentic search mode, which basically is sort of the fancy upgrade to Google alerts. You can have it sort of tell you when there's like a new home listed on Zillow or a new baseball score you might care about or something like that. I was really interested that they seem to be betting very big

on cost and speed. So their new model, that they talked about today was Gemini 3.5 Flash, which is the newest version, but it's also, they say, four times faster and much cheaper than the other leading frontier models. And so I think Google's strategy of kind of betting on scale and distribution and, like, making their models as efficient to serve as possible is really the direction they're going in. Like, they don't seem to care about having the absolute most cutting-edge models as long as. as they can serve them cheaply and quickly to billions of people. I mean, I think they care about it.

I think that they just haven't built it yet. You know, fast and cheap is what you talk about when it isn't the best. And so that's what we're getting this year. But, you know, I am interested in trying these new agents. I'll say, I try to use the new agent. I said, let me know if Kevin Ruse writes a good story, but it hasn't sent me anything. And so I don't know if it's broken or if the AI isn't working or what. Yeah, I'm writing good stories.

Constantly, so something must be going on. I mean, my real curiosity is like, which of these agents are going to find true product market fit? Like, which is the agent that is going to get a billion users? Because we saw them show off what is effectively their version of OpenClaw, which definitely had a big moment earlier this year. But it's still not clear to me that that is an actual mainstream use case. Like, I have to say, like, of everything they showed off, like, I'm not, like, dying to, like,

have, you know, Gemini, open claw working overnight on my behalf because I don't know what I would ask it to do. Yeah, I think that was actually one of my favorite parts because I am currently running a clawed swarm on my open laptop. Doing what? What is it doing? And what they have said is that you can now do that through Gemini, Spark, this new agent thing. And it will run in like a virtual machine on the cloud so you don't have to like keep your laptop cracked like an insane person. Kevin, please, what are you doing with your clotting? I can't even tell you. Because you're not doing anything. I'm ushering in the singularity.

You're generating recipes. I'm building a bio weapon, but I don't want to say that in this crowd. They get sensitive about that sort of thing around here. So what was the vibe of IO this year? I mean, honestly, the only people that I have talked to are, like, reporters and people who work at Google. So, like, I feel like we have not really had a chance yet to talk to developing. and see what is on their minds. Clearly, they have a lot of new toys to play with,

and I'm sure they're excited about that. But, you know, as I said, until you get your hands on them, you don't really know if your life has changed. Yeah, I feel like they have confidence in their sort of place in the front of the pack. I don't think they believe that their models are the best in the world yet, but if they're cheaper and faster and they can do more stuff, they have this new Omni model that can take in video, as well as images and text.

So I feel like they're sort of doing the spray and prey approach to AI development, which is you just do everything everywhere all at once and hope that something hits. And it's worked for them. Yeah. And I guess I will say one thing about the vibe here in I.O. this morning, Kevin, which is this is the only recent gathering of a large number of people where mentions of AI did not produce a large chorus of booze. This was a crowd where people actually seemed like they wanted to hear about new

AI developments and as we saw many, many AI generated images and videos for almost two hours, there was Neri Abu to be heard. I agree. Not a lot of mention of the AI backlash or any of the things. I think they're just sort of hoping that these new products are so useful to people that they'll sort of forget about all their objections. And then, you know, of course, comes Demis to Sissavis to talk about the singularity. Just to remind you that none of this is normal, that we are experiencing something very weird. All right, well, I think those are some good early thoughts. We have a lot more to do at I.O. starting with probably hitting that lunch line in the press tent. I saw some Ube croissants on my way in. I'm still trying to figure out what that means, but I'm

going to go try it out. Perfect. All right, Kevin, well, we are back in the studio the day after I.O, and we have a few hours before we head back down to interview Sundar Pichai. But before, before, we are back down to interview Sundarpa Chai. Before we do that, you have spent a little bit of time playing around with this new Gemini 3.5 Flash model. So what have you been doing with it? So I did try to use anti-gravity. They're a kind of coding assistant to put the model through some of my own evaluations. And it seems like two things are true. One is it's very fast. It's very fast and you don't hit your sort of token limits at all, like very quickly,

which is a nice contrast to some of the other coding model. that I've used. And the second thing is that it just doesn't seem like that much of an improvement over what is out there now. I think, you know, there have been some people on my feeds talking about how they are feeling disappointed by the new Gemini model. There's some indications that it's maybe not as good as Gemini 3.1 Pro at some coding evaluations. But it is much faster. And I think the other thing that people are reacting to is the cost. So the cost of Gemini 3.5 Flash, while lower than other kind of frontier models is significantly more expensive than the last version of Gemini Flash. So people are upset about that.

But I think in general, my sense is like, it's a good model. It's a pretty good model. It's not like blowing me away, but it is quite fast. And if you are a company that's burning billions of tokens a day, you might be interested in that. But for the average person, I would say, like, nothing about it has made me want to switch to it as my daily driver yet. Yeah, I have to say, like, this class of models has always just felt like it's not for me, right? Like, I am somebody who is always willing to wait a little bit longer and to spend a little bit more to get the best answer, right? Like, I would sort of rather do that than just sort of have, like, instant answers from a very cheap model.

You like to surround yourself with kind of awe-inspiring intelligence. Yes, that's exactly right. Because why we're hosting this podcast together. That's exactly right. And so, I mean, look, I think for a very wide variety of use cases, a model like this is going to be perfectly fine. If you're, you know, the average Gemini user and you're just trying to pass sixth grade for free, I think this model is going to be a lot of help. But, you know, the sort of more vocal AI power user crowd, which are the people that you're going to find on social media sort of putting these models through their paces on day one, does seem to be a little disappointed here. And I do think it's notable that a model that was sold to us yesterday largely on the strength of its low price does not actually seem to be as cheap as maybe we were told.

Yeah. And I think part of this is just that the cycle of kind of I.O. and developer conferences is maybe out of step with how these models are actually being built. I've been hearing some whispers from folks at Google that they are working on something that is more powerful, but that it just may not. not have been ready in time for IO this year. So I think that's one tricky thing about doing these conferences once a year is kind of every deadline has to line up at exactly the same time or else you end up looking like you're behind. Yeah, I mean, I think the real test for Google, I mean, at least the next real test for Google, will come next month when it puts out 3.5 pro, which I think will sort of be at a similar class of the frontier models that we have today. And that's when I'm going to sort of

be putting the model through all of its paces and trying to figure out, okay, like, what part of my daily workflows might this kind of thing slot into? Yeah. Casey, what is your verdict on I-O? Did it meet your expectations? It felt like a base hit to me. You know, I think that if they ship everything that they showed off and it works basically as advertised, like I think that there is some good stuff in there. I don't think that there was a single product that made me think, if I can't use this like today, I will be in extreme physical distress. But yeah, overall, I thought, you know, solid set of announcements.

What do you think? Yeah, I think that basically meets my expectations. I talked to one reporter who was walking around at I.O. And who said it was like mid, sort of like, you know, it's like good. It's good. It's a better position than they were in a couple years ago at I.O. When they were basically scrambling to get barred out the door and everything looked like it was going sideways.

So they found their footing, but it is still not clear whether they are producing a model that will truly be state of the art. All right, so that is some more of our thoughts and early hands-on impressions of Gemini 3.5 Flash. Now let's head down to Google to talk to Sundar. And because I imagine we might want to ask Sundar a question or two about AI, let's make our disclosures.

I work at the New York Times, which is doing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity. And my fiance works anthropic. We should also disclose that we both use Google. I'm a long-time Google user. I was part of the Gmail beta in 2004. Wow. You're old.

so old. Sundar Pachai, welcome back to Hard Fork. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Thank you. So the last time we had you on the show was in 2023. Bard RIP had just come out. And I think at the time, the perception was that Google was catching up in AI.

How are you feeling about your position in the race these days? Well, that brings back memory. So it feels like eons ago, you know, those three years feel like a long time ago now. But I think it's staggering to see. how much that both the technology is making progress. We've made progress as a company. And I think it's a very dynamic moment in the industry. I think our models are at the frontier in some areas,

you know, and there are areas where we are behind the frontier. And so it's a combination. I think if you look at, you know, overall capabilities, including text, multimodality, voice, or audio, reasoning in general, overall intelligence. I think we are very capable. When it comes to agentic coding with tool use and instruction following, long horizon tasks, I think we are a bit behind at this moment. But we are hard at work.

and the space is so dynamic. You know, all of the leading labs have their own pre-training cycles. So you have these cadences and they may not exactly match up. I think the moment is intense enough that if you're slightly off, you know, three months ago people are like, we are ahead and no one could catch up with us and then, you know, now the conversation flips. But that's part of the territory of being at the frontier. I think we are the only large company which is actually at that frontier, right? So one way to think

about it is there are, you know, in this moment, there are a couple of startups which have made extraordinary progress. And, you know, we are, we have been deeply working on this for a long time. I think we took a big step forward with 3.5 flash. It does address some of the areas we have been behind. And I think, obviously, getting it out in the real world and iterating with that data coming back is going to really help us. I think coding was the area where getting access to the data flows was important. I think we maybe quite didn't have the surface, like clot code as an example, or what Anthropic maybe had with cursor too. And so getting anti-gravity with 2.0, we've been using it internally at Google for a while.

I shared the token usage at Google I.O. I've never seen anything like it internally. We are doubling every week, and people are really putting the models to work. And so that is helping us hill climb quite a bit. But, you know, the frontier is very dynamic, but I'm very, very optimistic. and confident, we'll push through there. It sounds like if there's any place where you feel maybe not quite at the very lead where you actually want to be, it is coding. Is that where you're sort of putting the pressure?

Look, I think coding ends up being very foundational in everything we do. So I think it's an important frontier to be on. There are areas in coding where we've been very good. We've been very, very good at creating single-shot web front-ends, everything. But in terms of this long-running, you know, a task where serious developers are working on complicated code basis. I think we are making progress. It is just that there is a gap to the frontier where others are. But we are working, you know, we are well aware of it and, you know, making progress there.

3.5 Flash has been out for a day. I do think it typically takes a few days to really put these models through their paces. We have seen some complaints, though, about pricing, model quality. Curious, like what you've made of the reception so far. You know, it's, I'm looking forward to being done with my interviews and so on so that I can spend more time on with the teams. Yeah, wrap it up, Luis. No. Look, we, you know, I'm going to meet the teams right after this.

I think we are definitely, you know, I'll take a day or two to settle in. I think it's a new model. And in a new area where we've made some progress that could. be some regressions, but we will be able to quickly address them through our post-training pretty quickly, I think. There are some artifacts and behaviors we are seeing, which I think are easy to address, so we will. I do think given it was a day after us putting out a lot of things, I think we had tightened

usage limits to avoid outages, but you will see us make progress on usage limits very soon. that is rightfully a source of frustration when you encounter. I feel the same, but those are areas we will address pretty soon and make progress. It seems like one thing that some of the AI companies are succeeding at is focus, just anthropic and OpenAI have this sort of relentless focus on coding. Open AI was criticized last year for sort of spreading their bets too thin, trying to do too many things all at once. They've now sort of tightened that.

Do you feel like Google is appropriately focused on coding or are all the other other bets you're making, taking away resources and time and focus from the main push? I think all of us saw some time around, you know, there was an inflection point in coding. And I think we're all responding to it. I think we all have, you know, pretty serious strikes around this area. And so I don't see it as an issue for, we are a large company. we have scale. So we will be able to focus on a few multiple things at the same time. I don't see it as any fundamental issues as much as we are making progress. We're going to make progress. I think we are in a moment in time in this field where 30 to 60 days look like five years. That's all

it is. Yeah. Another thing that got a lot of attention this week was the changes that you all made to the search bar and the sort of front door of Google, the biggest change in 25 years. I think a lot of people expect that at some point, the kind of normal Google sort of classic search interface goes away. The 10 blue links maybe go away and you just kind of have this AI mode as the default. But you haven't sort of done that yet. There's a lot of integration, but you still can get the 10 blue links if you want them. Do you think that goes away at any point to rip the Band-Aid off and just go full AI mode? You know, I think it's important to bring users along the journey as well as making sure the product

is working for their expectations. So, you know, I try not to get ahead of that. I think it is very clear as we evolve through these changes. People are responding positively. We can see it in the long-term metrics of the product in such a clear way, right? And so I think we understand that. But, you know, people want search to be fast. I do think through search people are looking to connect with what's out there

on the web, so that's important to us. It's all of that. So I think you're seeing as evolve the product. And I think you'll continue to see it be methodical, but, you know, we didn't have AI mode a year ago. But now a lot of people are experiencing it. I think we have made it more seamless to go there than before. And so it's a continuum.

But I don't see sources and links will always be there as part of it. He was telling me on the ride down that he feels like he basically has not done a traditional Google search in the past year that he's sort of fully doing these AI searches. When you hear that, are you like, cool? Like, this is the kind of user that I want right now, or does it send you a little chill? Because, you know, the sort of traditional search ads business is pretty good for you. Well, you know, I think we will, if anything in the AI mode, you know, in an agentic moment, these things are going to do a lot more for you than what we were able to do for users 10 years ago.

I think the economic value is always a function of the total value you're giving users. I think all of us would say over time the value we are providing users increases. There's more competition. There are more choices. So I feel comfortable between a combination of subscription and ads that the right models will continue to be there. Adam Smith's rules don't change in this new world. Let's talk about public perception. The New York Times, CNN did a poll this week,

found that only about 16% of people say that AI is mostly good, about 35% say it's mostly bad. What do you make of the AI backlash that we're seeing right now, and how much leverage do you think Google has to change that perception? I mean, AI is, you know, I've always viewed it as the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. it's progressing at an extraordinary pace. You know, humans aren't evolved to process that much change.

And there are, I think people rightfully so are anxious about, you know, what is the future that this technology will bring. So to me, you know, I understand it. I think it feels to me natural with, like, such a profound technology shift. We've had far simpler technology shifts where there are speaking. anxiety around those shifts, this is of a scale unlike anything we've seen before. I think we as an industry have to do a lot more to continue driving and showing the benefits that's possible with the technology. So that is something in our control.

We have more work to do to make sure when we are scaling up the infrastructure investments, etc. You know, what are the things we can do to make some of that work better? But I think people's concerns are a bit more fundamental around the shift than all of that. I think a natural part of this is people are anxious about their economic future in this world. And, you know, you have a lot of conversation where people saying, you know, jobs are going to radically change. Some of it will go away, et cetera. I happen to think, you know, the outlook is better than some of those dire predictions.

But, you know, as a society, if you're hearing, it's natural. I would be surprised if people who aren't more anxious about it. I do think it's important because the change is happening so fast you need people to, in democracies, you need citizens to be engaged, be aware that this is happening

and make their preferences known. That's what causes action in society. So I think there's something healthy about this dialogue too, which is happening. And given the pace at which the technology is moving forward, it seems right to me both the concerns and the fact that we need to take it seriously. You're giving the commencement speech at Stanford next month. I'm sure you've noticed or heard that a bunch of commencement speakers have been booed recently by college students who are worried about AI.

What are you planning to tell the graduates about AI and do you have your like boo strategy in place? Anytime we have driven technology progress, I think it has. helps drive progress in the world. And in some ways, these graduates are actually both going to be a big part of that driving that progress and also dealing with the impact of that technology. So I think we have to be very mindful of that. And, you know, I've always been an extraordinary optimistic about the next generation. I think we all always have this view in the world.

You know, we are anxious and we worry about the next generation. next generation, but I think the next generation rises to the challenge and, you know, builds a better world. And so I viewed as no different from those moments. And, you know, my goal would be to share, you know, my experiences and share that with them. And that's what I'm looking to do. You can just pretend they're saying Google. It's like, it's close enough, you know. I'd be curious to hear a little bit more about your case that, like, that you think that, sure, jobs may change a lot, but, you know, you entry-level graduate, the economic, future is still bright for you?

Like, what is that case in your mind? You know, at a basic level, I do think we are, you know, there is a new level of capability. All of us are going to have to be able to do things. And, you know, I wasn't there, like, when spreadsheets rolled out to people. Like, you know, I wouldn't know how you did financial analysis before that. Like, you know, how did people do it? I'll say it. I didn't do it. I had no idea how to do it. But, you know, spreadsheets changed that. And so there's an aspect of this. I think it just is going to change the starting point for many, many people. Just even coding, I think if you fast forward the progress we are seeing there, so many more people are going to be able to code in the world. Right. And, you know, I've heard you two might be examples of that and, like, you know, in that journey. But I think you're just at the, leading edge of what is going to happen more and more.

So I think those are the new serendipitous ways this will all work out that we underestimate. I think people are going to be more productive. They will have more time for leisure. All of that will simultaneously be true. There are so many areas where today people's work, you know, involves a lot, you know, doctors have, you know, high burnout rates. And it's, you know, it's because they train and, you know, and their calling is to spend time with patients,

taking care of patients. But, you know, most doctors would tell you if you actually watch their time, the percentage of time they spend with patients is less, right? So I think AI will actually help them do more of that, right? I think those are examples of it. The radiologist's analogy has been fascinating. It's been now a decade running. I look at myself and I say,

well, I've gotten a lot more scans in my life than my dad ever did. And each of the scans have like 10x amount of information than his scans had because they were constrained by a printing film versus us being digital. And I think that number is going to be 10x. in 10 years. So where is that projection going into, you know, you are actually going to need AI to keep up, right,

with that demand coming? So I think it's nonlinear, how the impact of all this will be. This is not, I don't want to be, I don't want in any way to minimize, every technology shift brings disruption with it. And, you know, I think, you know, there will be disruption and we as a society

need to be super serious about it and engage. And so some of the conversations, I think are rightful in like, you know, thinking through that. But I do think there are many positive dimensions to it, which are maybe not being talked about. And I think, and also there is overly deterministic dire scenarios, which I quite don't agree with as part of it. Let's talk about agents, because I feel like agents actually tie sort of into this question

of, well, what is going to make us more productive in the future, and how will it change our job? Later this summer, you're releasing Spark, which I seem sort of intended to be an agent for the regular person. And I'm so curious to know, like, could you walk us through something this agent is doing for you personally? I've used it a lot more in my professional context, more to the context, because it was mainly available in my Corp account, right, as part of it. In that context, I've definitely used it as it's super easy to use. it to prepare for any meeting. I wish I had brought the prompt slash the output for, like I just as a test case, used it for hot fork. Honestly, if you email to us, we would

flash it on the screen. Yeah, well, yeah, it adds some things about the two of you, so I don't think I can project it. No, that's what we want. We want that. We want to know how jump my track us. I'm not sure I love that too. No, I'm just kidding. Partially kidding. So you used to see Casey's browser history. Partially getting. But I have had it in my personal account more recently. So again, here's the simple task I did. I just asked it to just look ahead at my meetings and color-coded in categories so that I can keep sense of how I'm spending my time.

I think, you know, it's extraordinary to watch it. It came back with, like, you know, suggestions of two color-coding schemes, and I just had to choose one. and it's actually like sci-fi, it's just like, you know, changes the color in the calendar. Personal meetings, health-related meetings, you know, time I'm spending at work, etc. That's an example of a personal query I just did just to see what's happening, right? But with agents, I think you have to give people a sense of, I think about this as what allowed us to get someone to sit in the backseat of a self-driving car, right? we did it in steps. And I think there's an element of that

where with agents, if something unexpected happens, I think, you know, people back off from this. And, you know, so part of it is earning their trust. And so giving them a sense of control, transparency, but more importantly, from a security standpoint, these systems, you know, can be hacked.

And so we want to make sure we are not ahead of the frontier in a wrong way. Speaking of meetings and your count, We hear that you're headed to the White House for some kind of AI executive order signing. What should the government be doing right now to regulate AI? Do you like this idea of a kind of pre-release strategy where the government gets to sort of see models before they're released and sign off on them? Is that a good idea?

Is that potentially dangerous if it gives them the ability to censor or jaw-owned companies into releasing different kinds of models? What's your take on that? Look, we'll have to wait and see the details. of the full executive order, but they've been very, they've engaged with the industry in a very robust way. And I think the approach really balances, you know, innovation and oversight. We'll have to wait for the details to come out. But, you know, there are a few areas which are coming up, you know, we will need more cross-industry, cross-industry, government

coordination. So it makes sense to me. Cyber is a great example of that. we all have to work together. It makes full sense to me if you have found an exploit, which could impact a governmental agency. The government needs to be prepared for it. So there is validity, but of course doing it in a moment with this important technology, where it's important as a country to be at the frontier too, not doing it in a way where you're overly slowing things down, and maybe that balance has to shift as we reach more advanced levels of technology, but I think, I think, to me, this seems like a prudent approach. In general life, you know, part of what we are doing with, you know, building synth ID,

open sourcing it, and then sharing it with others, and more importantly, building a consortium together, I think as an example of, in a different area, these things only work together if we can come together as an industry. So, you know, I'm glad they're approaching it. in that way. Another sort of safety-related question. All of the big labs are racing toward what you call recursive self-improvement, so building AI systems that improve themselves rapidly. Do you think that can be done safely?

And do you feel like you have a line of sight to it right now? You know, these models are getting better at, you know, coding and agentic workflows. And so at some point, you know, you know, we did, you know, we did, you know, We did, you can see in anti-gravity today, you know, in over 12 hours, it can build a simple OS from scratch, right? And, you know, that is, I mean, genuinely, those are multiple thousands of hours for somebody to do, right? So you are seeing some of that in work today. We are all in our products in some version or the other have agents and sub-agents and the orchestration of those agents building things together.

it's a continuum, right? And I think we are all definitely making some progress. But in the way people describe RSI, I don't think we are there yet. And, you know, that would represent the next level of acceleration. And I think, you know, and I think would have a lot of implications.

But we aren't quite there yet. Is there like a plan for, oh-oh, like, I mean, great news soon. Like, we just hit RSI. Like, is there a sort of, do we break glass? or what happens then? It's a great example of like, look, I think all responsible labs, I think if you're approaching moments like that,

you would be, you know, consulting with, you know, it shouldn't be an internal conversation at that point. I think it has to be a much broader conversation than that. And I think we all have to avoid race conditions at those stages of AGI. Right now, all the labs are racing to get more, compute. There seems to be bottomless demand for compute. They're hoarding it wherever they can, striking deals, you know, building their own data centers. Google is still selling access to

TPUs to rivals and other companies in the race. Why? Why aren't you just keeping that for yourselves and your own models? I think each is not a constraint on the other, right? So as long as we can make enough chips, it's not a constraint. The right way to think about it is we have GDM and our first body services. If you can think about that as a company, business, cash flows, you're planning for that. And then you have Google Cloud, which is a business and which has revenue cash flows, and you're doing long-term plan, and you're planning for that. So if he didn't have cloud and we weren't providing, we wouldn't be planning those chips anyway.

Right. And so that's at the simplest level. Obviously, you know, it's a bit more complex than that. But there are a lot of advantages of providing TPUs to others. The fact that researchers at Anthropic are using TPUs is what will allow us to make, in addition to us, allows us to make the best hardware in terms of next generation. And by the way, we use NVDS chips too, and the next generation chips are incredible. And so we use that and we work too.

When you're running platforms, I mean, you have a platform side of the business. and, you know, I've always have worked on many platforms in my life and be it Chrome or Android or Google Cloud, you know, why would you ever open source something or why do you provide this technology? I mean, all that makes sense on its own merits. I do think there are advantages, like I mentioned,

it allows us to stay at the frontier. You know, economies of scale helps in various ways. And so it makes a lot of sense that way. Yeah. The last time we had you on, we asked you about AGI and your feelings about the term. And at the time, you responded that it didn't really matter whether you've reached AGI or not because the systems are going to be very, very capable and Google's strategy should be the same. I noticed that you did not say AGI in your keynote, Demis did, but you did not. What's your relationship with the term

AGI today and sort of the idea that all of this progress is building towards something singular and world-changing? Oh, we are, you know, there is inevitable progress towards AGI that's happening. I've long understood it and, you know, otherwise I wouldn't have pivoted the company 10 years ago to like put that technology at the heart and center of the company. All I meant by that statement was even in the scenario AGI is going to take 10 years, the technology which three years out will be so much more powerful than what we have today that I don't want people to think, because AGI is 10 years out, you don't need to act or prepare.

That is all my statement means in those contexts. Are you AGI pilled? Well, I absolutely, you know, I'm sure that the technology is making foundational progress towards AGI. I'm less able to predict with certainty, whether it's in the three to five-year time frame or five-to-10-year time frame. The rate of progress over the last one to two years has made me feel it's on the closest side than not. And, you know, I just don't, you know, in your role running one of the largest companies in the world, which has a responsibility to society, the language I choose to use around it might be different than other people. But I think, you know, as a company in terms of, you know, 10 years ago, the I-o stage, I announced TPUs and AI first. data centers, you know, yes, clearly understood where this technology said it.

Maybe it was the last question. One of the more memorable phrases, I think, from the keynote this year did come from Demis when he said that we're in the foothills of the singularity. Can you tell us, like, concretely what that means from Google's perspective? And should people be excited about that or afraid or both? Look, I've had many conversations with Demis, obviously, on this topic. And I think in this context, he's, I think he's defining singularity as the advent of AGI. I think he's talking in that context.

And, you know, I think if you think, regardless of, if I remember, I think he had kind of articulated by 2030 or so, I think if you believe that, it makes sense to you. That's what you're articulating. And, you know, it's as simple as that. I think for him, that's how we define singularity. and I think Demas, myself, many others, we all feel it's important to, if that's what you believe, it's important to articulate that because we are all at the frontier building this technology. And, you know, hopefully people are listening.

And I think it's important to, as a society, we are internalizing that and getting ready for it. Suner Prachid, thanks so much for coming. Thank you, sir. Thanks. Great to talk to you. Appreciate it. Take care. When we come back, a few more highlights from this week in our system update.

Well, Casey, other than I.O., there has been a lot happening this week on some stories that we have covered in the past. So it is time for our segment that we call System Update. All right, update number one is that the Elon Musk OpenAI trial is finally over after weeks of testimony. We got a verdict on Monday. And what was that verdict, Kevin? Well, after less than two hours of deliberation, the jury came back and unanimously rejected Elon Musk's claims, not on the merits, but just on the sort of grounds that he'd waited too long to file the lawsuit. They said it fell outside of the three-year statute of limitations. And they basically said, we're not going to even debate the merits because it's too late. You're too late, bro. When is Elon Musk going to catch a break in this crazy world? Yes. So I think the trial ended up being quite important, but not for reasons.

related to the trial. It was sort of all the evidence and all the gossipy, you know, juice that came out during the trial. It felt like a stimulus package for the tech media. Yes. Where we just sort of had a steady drip of new lore, and it kept us all very entertained. I don't know that we learned very much that, you know, truly affected public sentiment one way or the other, but I definitely learned things from this trial that I'll never forget. Yep, me too. Yeah. And Elon Musk is obviously saying he is not done with fighting open A.I. We haven't seen the last of him. His lawyer said that he would appeal the decision. And on X, he said, quote, creating a precedent to loot charities is incredibly destructive to charitable

giving in America. Charitable giving, obviously, something that Elon Musk famously cares a lot about. Also, one of the great revelations from this trial was that Elon Musk himself had been scheming, like prior to 2020, to turn Open AI into a for-profit company and even absorb it into Tesla. So, effectively to do all of the things he would later complain that OpenAI actually did. Yeah. Do you agree with Musk that this is essentially a technicality and that there's still some substantive issues that need to go to trial here? Well, I mean, every law in some sense is a technicality, Kevin. Like, that's how the legal system works. And he put this one to the test and he lost. Yeah. Is there any lawsuits you've been waiting to file that you should get in under the statute of limitations?

My backlog of lawsuits is so big. I've got to finish this podcast and get to it. All right. Update number two. meta is continuing to reshuffle and shrink its workforce. This Wednesday, the company officially laid off 10% of its workers, roughly 8,000 people. We talked about these rumors on the show a couple months ago in terms of their relationship to AI and the fact that they were seemingly cutting workers to sort of make space for more AI in the organization. We knew that these layoffs were coming, but we also got a new update to the story this week, which is that meta announced that on top of these layoffs, it is also reassigning 7,000 workers to new

initiatives related to building new AI tools and apps. Janelle Gale, Meta's head of HR, said in an internal memo that the restructuring, quote, will make us more productive and make the work more rewarding. You know, there truly is no company among the big labs that has done as many reorgs of its AI teams that Meta has done. I mean, like, you could almost, like, set your watch to how often these things have been happening. Yes, this is a company that specializes in corporate reorganizations and just happens to also make some popular social media.

They monetized through social media, but the product is reorgs. Yes. But, you know, look, I have talked to some people who have actually been sort of impressed with the scale and the scope of what meta is doing here. Like, if you want to know what does it look like for a big tech company to move heaven and earth to try to catch up in an area where it is behind, this is what that looks like. You know, so far, I don't think the efforts have borne much fruit. But look, they have just reassigned 7,000 people to work on initiatives related to, AI, and of course that's in addition to all the other hiring that they did last year. So, you know, I'm far from saying that meta is back in this race, but of all the reorgs they've done,

I do think this is one of the most intriguing. Yeah. And I think we should expect like a steady drip of stories from meta over the coming months about how bad morale is. It does seem to be quite bad over there at the moment. That always happens when you do these kind of major shakeups and reorgs. And they're also doing all this like employee surveillance stuff that workers are understandably upset about. There was some leaked audio published this week from a meeting in which Zuckerberg

basically said, look, we've got to train our systems to be good at coding and using computers. And the way that we do that is by training them on your computers and your coding because we have a bunch of really smart people here. And that was sort of his way to sort of explain away why they're surveilling their employees. Yeah, but I have to say, the whiplash between the meta of today and the meta that we were covering 10 years ago is pretty extreme. Like the thought just keeps occurring to me, meta used to be a fun place to work. They have like a fake main street at their corporate headquarters where you used to be able to walk into a Mexican restaurant where everything was free and you could drink a margarita at lunch. Now, that restaurant may still be there, but I think

the margaritas at lunch program is like on the decline because these people have to go create training data for large language models now. But, you know, I have to say to the employees, if you're like, man, this really sucks. Like, you know, I mean, my heart goes out to you. Everyone should have a job that they like. On the other hand, like, I think it's been clear for a long time that if you work at meta, your job is to help Mark Zuckerberg win the race to build AGI before anyone else. And that is the entire point of the company now. Yeah. Like there's not a secondary objective. Totally. All right. Next update. This one is a system pope date because this one has to do with our new Pope. Did he go on a date? No, they're not allowed to do that. Okay. Okay. But he is set to release

his first encyclical on the topic of AI. This coming Monday, Pope Leo the 14th is expected to to release his document, sort of circulated among the church that is meant to guide the clergy. And the surprising part of this is that Chris Ola, one of the co-founders of Anthropic, is going to be there at the Vatican to help him launch this thing. I didn't realize that we did launch events for encyclicals. You know, it's like the Pope finishes up with mass and says, but I do have one more thing. It's their I.O. Yes.

This is Vatican I.O. and I mean, I guess we'll be very curious what the Pope has to say. You know, Kevin, as you know, this Pope seems unusually interested in tech and has had like a relative lot to say about it during his, you know, short tenure. Yes. And I also am very excited about this because I think this does mean that Pope Leo the 14th is the most likely Pope to come on hard fork. Absolutely. And if you are in the Vatican listening to us right now, Pope Leo, please come drop your encyclical on our audience. Your Holiness, we would simply love to create content with you. All right, update four.

The literary world has been rocked by two new scandals related to AI use by writers. The first is that an award-winning short story has been criticized by people who think that it was generated by AI. Oh, boy. This story was a regional winner of the Commonwealth Foundation's Short Story Prize. It's called The Serpent in the Grove by Jemir Nazir of Trinidad. And it was published online by the British Literary Magazine Granta, but some readers thought, hey, this thing seems a lot like AI. It had some of the cliches of AI writing,

and people claim to have run this through PANGram, the AI detection tool, and found that the story appeared to be significantly or entirely generated by AI. Yeah, I'm not sure that the backlash here is warranted because this story has gotten more attention than any previous story written in Granta. Like, I think it's possible more people have read this story

than like anyone has read a Granta story, in years. We have figured out how to rescue fiction, and it is just to create controversies around AI. The Commonwealth Foundation responded to these accusations, saying in a statement that they, quote, place our confidence in the integrity of our contributors and the caliber and experience of the judges and chair of the judging panel and stand by the assurances given by our authors as part of our process. And I mean, look, like, we don't know. We don't know. We don't know. This is, I predict, a thing that is going to happen to every major literary prize is that every submission will just have to be run through an AI detector.

Also, we're all now just reading so much AI-generated text that I feel like inevitably, we are all just going to start writing more like it. And so even when you are writing something by hand, I think there is just a risk that over time it is going to look more like slop. It's not a trend. It's a transformation. There's another writing scandal that came to light this week. This one in the nonfiction world. This was according to my colleague Ben Mullen at the Times,

who wrote that a buzzy new book called The Future of Truth, which is about truth in the age of AI, appears to have included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by AI. The author Stephen Rosenbaum acknowledged the errors on Monday. He said that he took full responsibility for the errors, that he used AI tools like Chat Chbitty and Claude during the research, writing, and editing process,

and that he was working to correct future editions. This story implicated our dear friend Kara Swisher, Kevin. I don't know if you saw this, but Kara was one of the people who had fabricated quotes attributed to her appear in this book. And it's so funny because if you read the quote that's attributed to her, it does read just like pure chat, GPT. Yes. Do you want to hear it? Yes. The most sophisticated AI language model is like a mirror.

It reflects our own morality back at us, polished and articulate, but ultimately empty behind the surface. It's not bound by Asimov's loaves or any ethical framework. it's bound by the patterns in its training data and the objective set by its creators. If you've ever talked to Paris Swisher. She has been brain swapped. A true pod person situation. So, yeah, this one, I mean, like,

truly nothing could be funnier about, like, a book about AI and truth, just having a bunch of, like, hallucinated slop quotes in it. Yeah. You know, you have often said that, like, anyone who puts a rule into, you know, like a workplace, a school,

a publishing house that says, hey, no AI use. All you're doing is telling everyone that they have to lie about their AI use. This seems like we're just kind of like hitting some kind of inflection point where it's just becoming obvious that even people who absolutely should not be doing this are still just like getting lazy and not doing the work.

Yeah. And I would say like it's not just laziness. Like there are a lot of things that AI tools can help you with on books. I've been using AI not for writing my book. It's all human generated. But like in, you know, collecting end notes and indexing and like various things that are not the main book itself. And I have had to go through with a fine-tooth comb to make sure that all of the sources that my AI tools wanted to cite were actually real.

And, you know, most of them were, but, like, most is not enough, especially if you were writing a book about truth in the age of AI. Yeah. And so I have had to do some cleanup on that before sending it off to the printer. So I understand how this kind of thing could happen, but you really got to go through if you're doing this and make sure that. you are not passing off someone's words that they didn't say. Well, let this be a lesson to all of the writers among our listeners. Because Kara Swisher will get your ass. She will absolutely get your ass.

All right, before we go, we have one more update. This one is very exciting. It is about Hard Fork Live. Yay! That is our upcoming live event in San Francisco on June 10th, and we are finally ready to share our guests for the event. Casey, who do we have? Well, leading off our lineup this year at Hard Fork Live, Kevin,

will be Microsoft CEO Satchanadella. I'm hitting every sound effect on the board right now. They're only two. This is somebody who we have been trying to talk to ever since we started Hard Fork, somebody who is at the center of everything that is happening in AI, and also just a really fun person to talk to.

So, thrill to have Sacha as a marquee guest for us at Hard Fork Live. Yes, we have a bunch more exciting guests. Figma CEO Dylan Field will be there. We've got Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Plus, we've got a bunch of other great guests, including Friend of the Pod and fellow tech podcaster, Dwarkesh Patel,

AI as Normal Technology co-author, Syash Kapoor, and AI 2027 author, Daniel Kokatelo. And you might be wondering, Kevin, will there be any fun surprises this year? Will there be any fun surprises this year? That will absolutely be some fun surprises. So here's ordinarily where we would tell you you could get tickets, but you can't throw off a lot.

Yes. But the good news is we will be, of course, bringing you all of those conversations here on the podcast in the weeks to come. So fear not. Hard Fork Live will be part of your life one way or another. Can't avoid us. And that was our system update. What year is it?

Are we snapping again? We're snapping. Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Viren Pavich. We're fact-checked by Kit and Love. Today's show was engineered by Katie McMurran. Original music by Alicia Baitoup, Marion Lazzano, Rowan, Rowan Nemistow, Alyssa Moxley, and Dan Powell.

Video production by Vyart Pavich, Jake Nickel, and Chris Schott. You can watch this episode on YouTube at YouTube.com slash hard fork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Puewing Tam, and Dahlia Haddad. You can email us, as always, at hardfork at nytimes.com.