Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - The AI Skills Gap Is Real: Google VP on Why People Are Falling Behind and What to Do Right Now | Yossi Matias

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

Yossi Matias has been inside Google Research for 20 years. He built Autocomplete, Google Trends, and Google Duplex before most people knew what a large language model was. His argument isn't that AI is coming. It's that we already passed the inflection point and most of us didn't notice because we adapted. In this conversation: 6 things changing how we work right now, why one person can now do the work of three, which skills Google actually hires for in 2026, and what the flood prediction system covering 2 billion people tells us about what's possible next.More from the Silicon Valley Girl: Newsletter:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate

with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, turns at AKA.m.m.S. college PC. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th,

and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavat Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. Something shifted in 2006 that most people haven't really sat with yet. 36% of new companies are now solo founded, one person, no co-founder, no team. And this company is building things that used to require 12 people, 100 people. Five years ago, that number was 23%.

Demand for analytical and technical skills is up 20% in two years. And people who actually work with AI, not just use it, are pulling ahead, visibly in terms of salary, in terms of how they're catching up with the world. And I wanted to understand what's happening so you can jump on these trends and maybe build a new career or build a new business or at least optimize your life. So if you have things in your life that you wish, AI is changing how we do things and you need to understand this. In this episode, I will also talk to someone who represents a company I admire Yossi Matias

head of Google Research. He built Google Trans, something that I use all the time. He built Auto Complete. He's been at Google for more than 20 years and Google is one of the top companies leading this revolution. He doesn't do many interviews, so I'm really glad we did this one. Let's start with trend number one, AI agents. When most people think about AI, they think about asking for information in a chat bot.

You ask something and answers. What's actually happening right now is different. Agents execute for you and you hand of tasks across your entire system, your email, your calendar, your research, you CRM, and you don't have to touch it. For example, I just set up an agent. It's really easy to do that with perplexity computer, for example. It just automates the hell out of everything. So I'm keeping track of a couple of people on Instagram,

and I want to know what's going viral for them. So perplexity just goes, analyze as what's going viral, and every morning I get an email, what's going on in their accounts, how people are reacting, and I get a personalized script on a similar topic so I can make a video. And it's crazy. Stanford track that 35% of productivity gains is happening right now from using context-aware agents.

That's the difference between, a four-day week and a six-day week. What this means for your job is that the person who learns to set up and run an agent isn't just faster. They are doing work that used to require two or three people. Trend number two, vibe coding. This one I personally find the most exciting and honestly a little wild. Vipe coding means describing in plain language what you want to build and having AI write the actual code. I have a person on my team who doesn't know how to code. She runs my LinkedIn and she had an idea on Tuesday, on Thursday, it was a working product and again, she doesn't know how to code at all.

Yossi's team at Google has been working on something they called Generative UI, where you describe what you want, and in about a minute, you get a fully interactive application. Button, logic, interface, all in a matter of a few minutes. Again, what this means for you, if you've been waiting to build something, a tool, a product, or a workflow, or if you have an idea, instead of just talking about this idea to your teammates, just go and build it.

This barrier is gone. You talk to the app and you pitch a prototype. I think they are underhyped. Oh, you think so? Yeah, definitely. And here's my. So first, we should always keep in mind that what we're seeing today is not the future. We're just seeing today.

And, you know, having been working for over a decade on search, in search, we suddenly take the user intent and we try to give the best information. Now with AI systems, we can actually understand much better user intent and let them actually express what we do. Now, vibe coding is a great example where people can now actually say what they want to be developed and you can already, everybody can now develop an application that previously required a team. Even we recently shared something that we call generative UI that enables you to actually, for any prompt, get a result out of, we have an experiment within a Gemini app called

Dynamic View that gives the full interaction, full interactive user interface in about a minute for any prompt that you ask, as if somebody was developing. an application on your behalf. So only you need to say what you'd like to learn about, and it will sometime even give all the buttons and simulation. And in fact, the technology is now available also in search AI mode. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition. For Citizens Bank. Trend number three, the skills that actually matter are shifting. The reflex most have is AI is replacing jobs so I need to become more technical to survive, learn to code,

get a data science certificate, whatever. That's not wrong, but it's incomplete. Yossi hires constantly at Google Research, one of the most exciting places to be right now, and ask him directly, what are you actually looking for right now? And the answer wasn't a specific skill, it was the ability to think, adapt, and learn faster than technology changes. He said people need to relearn how to work even at senior levels because the tools shift every single month. But what that actually means in practice, the people pulling ahead aren't the ones who know more. They are the ones who know what to give to AI and what questions to ask when it gives back. So if there is one thing you should be working on is actually your judgment. How do you know

what is good and what is bad in your job? That judgment is learnable. You can work for somebody who has perfect taste and learn it from them. But almost nobody's deliberately practicing it, But that is exactly what's going to give you premium when you're looking for a job. I try to hire people who have taste, who can make strategic decisions, who know what's great for my content. And I care less about the technical skills. Because, again, Claude is someone who knows everything about what's going on in the world, but it can't make a judgment as good as a person. Yeah.

So, in a way, I remember I was asked, so how do you think things are going to change five years? And I thought about it. In one hand, everything is going to be different. On the other hand, nothing is going to be different. I've heard that at Davos this year. In a way, I mean, we're humans, right? And what's motivation for what we're doing? It's not really to fulfill a particular predetermined task.

We define our own ambitions, our own tasks. Same with learning. I remember the early days when suddenly Google was made possible for everybody to get facts. And people say, wait a minute, what's going to do for kids? Because we ask them to do homework and collect facts in the library. And now it's easy. to be lazy? Well, no. Because now this is a given. That's a tool. So now we expect them actually to go to the next level. We expect them to synthesize. And now with AI, of course, there's another

conversation. What is it going to do? And my prediction is that, in fact, we're just going to up-level what we expect. That's why I'm thinking about AI as an amplifier for human ingenuity. Now, what are we going to do with that? That goes back to the motivation. Why are we doing what we're doing. So in a way, our lifestyle going to change, definitely, but the basics are probably not going to change at all, which is about people working with other people, about solving important problems that they're excited about. Yeah. And as a person who's constantly hiring, can you talk about the skills that you're looking for, both technical and non-technical? One thing that I always thought is critical is the ability to think, the ability to adopt.

the ability to evolve, the ability to actually think about problems and then try to solve them. Now, today, these are more important than ever, of course, because, you know, technology is moving fast. People need to adjust their learning, even no matter how experience they are, there are new technologies. Engineers need to relearn, you know, how to use AI in order to be more productive and people are doing it. So the ability to adapt, to learn, to have a strong foundation is more important than ever. So for example, when I refer to AI as an amplifier of human ingenuity and the opportunity for every researcher to be able to use AI in order to actually ask your questions, it's important to also adapt and learn how to do that. you know, if we really want people to be able to do the kind of roles that today we expect many more senior, people who are much more senior to do, obviously we need them to learn how to do that much quickly. The good news is that I believe that AI can help us with that as well, with kind of tutoring, with feedback.

The fact that to write a paper, for example, AI can give you very, the kind of feedback that in the past you actually needed the attention of your advisor perhaps to do. Oh, yeah. So I think we are going to adapt in all of these dimensions. And I think humans are what we proved over the years is that we are extremely adaptive. Trend number four, AI is becoming invisible. Yossi called it ambient intelligence. The idea is that technology becomes powerful precisely when you stop noticing it. Think about Google Translate.

When did you last think about how it works? You just use it. Or autocomplete, Yossi built that. Nobody thinks about auto-complete. anymore it's just expected that's what's happening with AI tools right now what this means for you is that as an employer for example I already expect beautiful presentations I already expect that you do a very very deep dive into what's happening in the business like all of these beautiful documents they are a must

because it takes a few minutes to generate them with AI there's deep intelligence on the project but again it brings me back to this idea that beautiful reports deep analytics and everything is already expected just because it's so easy to do that. What we're paying premium for is creative decisions, right? Being on a call and explaining to the team the trajectory we're moving into. And that is something you can just generate with AI. So one notion that I've been quite passionate about for quite some time

is what I would call ambient intelligence, which is that you have technologies that you just use. You don't think about them. They're becoming so... available and so intuitive that you actually don't, you just assume they work, right? Think about Autocomplete, which I also had the privilege to develop with my team over the years in search. People just assume that you start typing and it will just suggest to you. And I remember that people were in the early days, what about this magic?

Wow, how does it make a guess? And today you just expect it to be the case, right? And similarly, you can think about so many other technologies. Think about voice technology, the fact that now, You can speak and, you know, you expect what you're speaking to be understood. You can take text, you can listen to it. I remember actually working on these technologies in the early days. This was the aspiration.

And now you just assume this is the case. Think about multiple languages. I still remember the day that one of my kids came from school and say, hey, dad, what's going on with your translate? That line, that sentence was not translated very well. It's actually quite bad translation. And I was thinking to myself, you know, just a few years ago, having automatic translation of your page was science fiction,

and he assumes this is just available. Trend number five, AI is rebuilding education. Oh, I absolutely love Google's notebook LM. If you haven't used it for education yet, so basically you upload a bunch of files, and then you ask it, and now imagine it re-leveled for a 10-year-old who loves soccer, or gravity is explained using a free,

kick or turned into a podcast or an infographic that you can then post on LinkedIn and those infographics do really well or you can make a whole video out of it and post it on YouTube like that's explanation for you but also a lot of social media content the model where you had one textbook one level same for everyone is 200 years old AI is breaking it and I think a lot about my daughters on this one kids who grow up with personalized AI tutors from age five are going to arrive at 18 with a completely different foundation than kids who didn't. That's a 10-year advantage. So if you are re-skilling now, make sure you use all of the

advanced tools. You know, education, which is one of theirs, I think is highly important, is a way that is really poised to be transformed. And we have a recent experiment of asking ourselves, can we reimagine the textbook? Instead, can we take a textbook and use AI in order to actually give it in different experiences that are going to be personalized and contextualized? So, for example, can I have an immersive, can I take the text and make it immersive? Think Harry Potter. Can I make it conversational? Can I have a sketchbook with that?

A podcast. And by the way, can I have it in a level that is suitable for the audience? So, for example, can I explain gravity to a 10-year-old who likes soccer so that a textbook can actually be releveled to 10-year-old kind of language and give examples from soccer? The answer is yes. We actually have some experiment. And these are early days. So I expect that in the future, it's going to be seamless.

It's going to be kind of just available to us. The trend that I'm seeing now as a mom, though, is that now kids are expected to know how to read when they start school, right? Because back in the day, you're like, your kid goes to school, no letters, no numbers. Now they're like, oh, I actually have the classes already reading. And they're five years old. And you're like, whoa, okay. You know, kids are already smarter, I think, than the older generation.

And I think that the next generation is going to be even smarter because they're going to have AI in their disposal. Yeah. So, and by the way, you know, typically we had to, most people had to focus and learn certain subject and focus mostly on that one. And when they wanted to work across disciplines, they had to meet with other folks and try to somehow do that together. We're going to have, everybody's going to have a polymath in their pocket.

Trend number six, that makes me actually really very optimistic. Problems that were impossible are being solved in five years. I want to end on this one because I think it really changes how you hold everything else, I just said. Yossi Steambo's flood prediction system. Seven years ago, every expert they talked to said it was impossible. Too many variables, no clean data, no way to get to seven days. Today, that system covers 150 countries and 2 billion people.

Under 5 years, start to finish. And we're getting better and better. Stanford economists called 2025 the AI harvest period. The experiments are done. What works is separating from what? from what doesn't. The industries with the highest AI exposure right now are seeing labor productivity grow 4.8 times faster than the global average. That's already measured. Like, how productive we're getting is just crazy. So when you're hearing AI can't do that yet,

maybe now, but see what happens in two weeks. Stay curious about what AI can and can't do. We all heard about a guy creating a vaccine for his dying dog to treat cancer. And being willing to update your answer every few months, that might be the the best underrated thing you can do for your career right now. When I say AI is an amplifier of human ingenuity, this is not only a prediction, this is a design goal. This is how I'd like us to build our systems, how I'd like us to see how we're helping the society to actually do that, how we're influencing education so that our kids can

actually grow into this future. And I'm quite optimistic about how we can actually have those next generation solve many other problems in the world. Yeah, because they have more to work with. I just wanted to ask you one last question. If somebody wants to remember one thing from this conversation, what is the mindset that they should adopt for 2006 to stay as positive as you are

and also relevant in the job market? Yes, so one exciting thing is about using technology and research is that certain problems that seem impossible are not necessarily impossible. In fact, I've yet to see something that is impossible to tackle. Here's an example. One area that we're using AI quite a bit is on climate resilience. How to address natural disasters.

One thing I learned at a time is that one area that we're not very helpful is an area of natural disaster, of flood prediction. Floods are causing thousands of deaths every year. Fast forward, we now have a system that provides flood predictions. predictions in 150 countries covering 2 billion people, predictions up to seven days in advance. And from what seemed to be impossible just seven years ago, we have a system doing that. It's a really opportunity for innovation to create value. By the way, on healthcare, we put out a model called Med Gemma, which now have over 2 million downloads,

which enables developers develop their own applications on medical capabilities. So in this video, six trends, real data, real examples from someone who has been building this for 20 years. Here's what I want you to take away from this. Trends are happening, regardless if you're with them or not. The people who are pulling ahead right now aren't necessarily the most technical, the most hardworking people in the room. They are the most curious. They're the ones who are trying the tool, or playing with things,

reading something on X, watching some good YouTube videos, ask the question, updated their workflow, and move on to the next thing. You already did that today. That's not nothing. Thank you so much for watching this and I'll see you soon. Enjoy more ways to save at Ralph's like low prices in every aisle. And when you download the Ralph's app, you can clip and save more with digital coupons every week. Plus, you can earn fuel points to save up to $1 per gallon at the pump. At Ralph's, you can enjoy more ways to save and more rewards every time you shop. So it's always easy to save big every day with savings and rewards. Ralph's SoCal for over 150 years.

Savings may vary by state. Fuel restrictions apply. See site for details. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion-dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story.

Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. On this channel.