Sundar Pichai Understands Why People Are Anxious About A.I.

“After a busy Google I/O, the company’s chief executive sits down with the hosts of “Hard Fork” to discuss the future of Google Search, how he’s using A.I. agents and his advice for college graduates.

 

When Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, took the stage at the company’s annual developer conference this Tuesday, he outlined a vision of an A.I.-assisted future aimed at making life just a little bit easier in myriad ways.

 

Over the next two hours, executives made a number of announcements, including for a revamped search page and new autonomous A.I. experiences clearly designed to compete with open-source agents like OpenClaw, as well as a speedy new model the company is calling Gemini 3.5 Flash. To hear Pichai tell it, in the coming months we should expect to see A.I. features everywhere across the Google suite that will be faster than most competitors, cheaper for enterprises and more useful for customers than ever before.

 

This comes, however, against the backdrop of a growing public opinion problem for A.I. companies: graduates have booed mentions of artificial intelligence at commencements around the country, and a recent New York Times/Siena poll found that 35 percent of respondents viewed the technology as “mostly bad,” compared with just 16 percent who viewed it as “mostly good.”

 

On Wednesday, we sat down with Pichai to talk about Google’s place in the A.I. race, whether the usefulness of the company’s products will be enough to overcome public skepticism and what he expects for the future.

 

Below is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

 

This conversation is about A.I. The New York Times has sued OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity over copyright issues — claims the companies deny. And Casey Newton’s fiancé works at Anthropic.

 

Kevin Roose: The last time we had you on the show was in 2023. Bard had just come out. And I think the perception at the time was that Google was catching up in A.I. How are you feeling about your position in the race these days?

 

Pichai: Well, that brings back memories. It feels like eons ago; those three years feel like a long time ago now. But I think it’s staggering to see how much the technology is making progress. We have made progress as a company, and I think it’s a very dynamic moment in the industry. Our models are at the frontier in some areas, and there are areas where we are behind the frontier.

 

If you look at overall capabilities like text, multimodality, voice or audio, reasoning in general and overall intelligence, I think we are very capable.

 

When it comes to agentic coding with tool use, instruction following and 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. All of the leading labs have their own pretraining cycles. You have these cadences, and they may not exactly match up. The moment is intense enough that if you’re slightly off — three months ago people were like, “We are ahead and no one can catch up with us” — now the conversation flips. That’s part of the territory of being at the frontier. I think we are the only large company that is actually at that frontier. One way to think about it is there are a couple of start-ups that have made extraordinary progress, and we have been deeply working on this for a long time.

 

I think we took a big step forward with 3.5 Flash. It addresses some of the areas we have been behind in, and obviously getting it out in the real world and iterating with that data coming back is going to really help us. Coding was an area where getting access to the data flows was important. We maybe didn’t quite have the surface, like Claude Code as an example, or what Anthropic maybe had with Cursor, too. And so getting Antigravity 2.0, we have been using it internally at Google for a while. I shared the token usage at Google I/O. I have never seen anything like it internally; we are doubling every week, and people are really putting the models to work. That is helping us hill climb quite a bit. The frontier is very dynamic, but I am very, very optimistic and confident we will push through there.

 

Casey Newton: It sounds like if there’s any place where you feel maybe not quite at the leading edge, it’s with coding. Is that right?

 

Pichai: Look, coding ends up being very foundational in everything we do. I think it’s an important frontier to be on. There are areas in coding where we have been very good. But in terms of these long-running tasks where serious developers are working on complicated code bases, we are making progress. But there is a gap to the frontier where others are. We are well aware of it and making progress there.

 

Newton: Gemini 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 and model quality. I am curious what you have made of the reception so far.

 

Pichai: We are definitely going to take a day or two to settle in. It’s a new model in a new area where we have made some progress. There could be some regressions, but we will be able to quickly address them through our post-training. There are some artifacts and behaviors we are seeing that I think are easy to address. I do think that given it was a day after us putting out a lot of things, 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 it; I feel the same. But those are areas we will address pretty soon.

 

Roose: It seems like one thing that some of the A.I. companies are succeeding at is focus. Anthropic and OpenAI have this relentless focus on coding. OpenAI was criticized last year for spreading their bets too thin and trying to do too many things all at once; they have now tightened that. Do you feel like Google is appropriately focused on coding, or are all the other bets you are making taking away resources, time and focus from the main push?

 

Pichai: I think all of us saw that there was an inflection point in coding, and we are all responding to it. We all have pretty serious strikes around this area. I don’t see it as an issue of focus. We are a large company, and we have scale, so we will be able to focus on multiple things at the same time. I don’t see it as a fundamental issue as much as that we are making progress. We are going to make progress. We are in a moment in time in this field where 30 to 60 days looks like five years. That’s all it is.

 

Roose: Another thing that got a lot of attention this week was the change that you made to the search bar and the front door of Google — the biggest change in 25 years. I think that a lot of people expect, at some point, that the classic web-search interface will go away, the 10 blue links maybe go away, and you just have this A.I. Mode as the default. But you haven’t done that yet. There is 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? That you rip the Band-Aid off and go full A.I. Mode?

 

Pichai: 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. I try not to get ahead of that. It is very clear, as we have evolved through these changes, that people are responding positively. We can see it in the long-term metrics of the product in such a clear way. But people want search to be fast. Through search, people are looking to connect with what’s out there on the web, so that’s important to us. You are seeing us evolve the product, and you will continue to see it be methodical. We didn’t have an A.I. Mode a year ago, but now a lot of people are experiencing it. We have made it more seamless to go there than before. It’s a continuum, but sources and links will always be there as part of it.

 

Newton: Kevin 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 is fully doing these A.I. searches. When you hear that, are you like, Cool, this is the kind of user that I want right now, or does it give you a little chill? Because the traditional search ads business is a pretty good one for you.

 

Pichai: In an A.I. Mode, in an agentic mode, these things are going to do a lot more for you than what we were able to do for users 10 years ago. The economic value is always a function of the total value you’re giving users. Over time, the value we are providing users increases, there’s more competition, and there are more choices. So I feel comfortable that, between a combination of subscriptions and ads, the right models will continue to be there. Adam Smith’s rules don’t change in this new world.

 

Newton: Let’s talk about public perception. A New York Times/Siena poll this week found that about 16 percent of respondents say that A.I. is mostly good and about 35 percent say it’s mostly bad. What do you make of the A.I. backlash that we’re seeing right now? And how much leverage do you think Google has to change that perception?

 

Pichai: A.I. is viewed as the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It’s progressing at an extraordinary pace, and humans aren’t evolved to process that much change. People, rightfully so, are anxious about the future that this technology will bring. I understand; it feels natural with such a profound technological shift. We have had far simpler technological shifts where there has been anxiety, but this is of a scale unlike anything we have seen before.

 

We, as an industry, have to do a lot more to continue driving and showing the benefits that are possible with the technology. That is something in our control. We have more work to do to make sure that when we are scaling up the infrastructure investments, what are the things we can do to make some of that work better. But people’s concerns are a bit more fundamental around this shift.

 

A natural part of this is that people are anxious about their economic future in this world. You have a lot of conversation where people are saying that jobs are going to radically change, some will go away, et cetera. I happen to think the outlook is better than some of those dire predictions, but as a society, I would be surprised if people weren’t more anxious about it.

 

It’s important because the changes are happening so fast. 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. There’s something healthy about this dialogue that is happening. 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.

 

Roose: You are giving the commencement speech at Stanford next month. I am sure you have heard that a bunch of commencement speakers have been booed recently by college students who are worried about A.I. What are you planning to tell the graduates about A.I., and do you have your boo strategy in place?

 

Pichai: Anytime we have driven technological progress, it helps drive progress in the world. In some ways, these graduates are actually going to be a big part of driving that progress and also dealing with the impact of that technology. We have to be very mindful of that. I have always been an extraordinarily optimistic person about the next generation. We always have this view in the world where we are anxious and worry about the next generation, but the next generation rises to the challenge and builds a better world. I view it as no different from those moments, and my goal would be to share my experiences with them.

 

Roose: You should just pretend they’re saying “Goooooo-gle”. It’s close enough.

 

Pichai: (Laughs.)

 

Newton: I would be curious to hear a little bit more about your case to an entry-level graduate that the economic future is still bright for them. What is that case in your mind?

 

Pichai: At a basic level, there is a new level of capability all of us are going to have to be able to do things. I wasn’t there when spreadsheets rolled out to people. I didn’t know how you did financial analysis before that. I had no idea how to do it. But spreadsheets changed that. There’s an aspect of this that is just going to change the starting point for many, many people. Even coding — if you fast forward the progress we are seeing there, so many more people are going to be able to code in the world. I have heard you two might be examples of that in that journey, but you are just at the leading edge of what is going to happen more and more.

 

Those are the serendipitous ways that this will all work out that we underestimate. 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 people’s work involves a lot of burnout. Doctors have high burnout rates, because their calling is to spend time taking care of patients, but most doctors would tell you that the percentage of time they spend with patients is less. A.I. will actually help them do more of that.

 

The radiologist analogy has been fascinating. It’s been running for a decade now. I look at myself and say, Well, I have gotten a lot more scans in my life than my dad ever did. And each of the scans has 10 times the amount of information than his scans had, because they were constrained by printing film versus us being digital. That number is going to be 10 times in 10 years. Where is that projection going? You are actually going to need A.I. to keep up with that demand. It’s nonlinear, how the impact of all this will be. Every technological shift brings disruption with it, and there will be disruption. As a society, we need to be super serious about it and engage. But there are many positive dimensions to it that are maybe not being talked about, and there is an overly deterministic, dire scenario that I don’t quite agree with.

 

Newton: Let’s talk about agents, because I feel like agents actually tie into this question of what is going to make us more productive in the future and how will it change our jobs. This summer, you are releasing Spark, which seems intended to be an agent for the regular person. Could you walk us through something this agent is doing for you personally?

 

Pichai: I have used it a lot more in my professional context, because it was mainly available in my corporate account. In that context, it’s super easy to use it to prepare for any meeting. I wish I had brought the prompts and the output for it — I just used it as a test case for Hard Fork.

 

Newton: Honestly, if you emailed it to us, we would flash it on the screen.

 

Pichai: Well, it had some things about the two of you, so I don’t think I can project it.

 

Newton: No, that’s what we want. We want that. We want to know how Gemini dragged us.

 

Pichai: I’m not sure I’ll allow that to — I’m just kidding. Partially kidding.

 

Roose: Yeah. You should see Casey’s browser history.

 

Pichai: But I have had it in my personal account more recently. Here’s a simple task I did: I just asked it to look ahead at my meetings and color-code them in categories so that I can keep sense of how I’m spending my time. It’s extraordinary to watch it. It came back with suggestions of two color-coding schemes, and I just had to choose one. It’s like sci-fi, it just changes the colors in the calendar — personal meetings, health-related meetings, time I’m spending at work, et cetera. That’s an example of a personal query I did just to see what’s happening.

 

With agents, you have to give people a sense of trust. I think about this like, what allowed us to get someone to sit in the back seat of a self-driving car. We did it in steps. With agents, if something unexpected happens, people will back off from this. Part of it is earning their trust and giving them a sense of control, transparency. And more important, from a security standpoint, these systems can be hacked, so we want to make sure we are not ahead of the frontier in a wrong way.

 

Roose: Speaking of meetings and your calendar, we hear that you’re headed to the White House for some kind of A.I. executive order signing. What should the government be doing right now to regulate A.I.? Do you like this idea of a prerelease strategy where the government gets to see models before they’re released and sign off on them? Or is that potentially dangerous if it gives them the ability to censor or jawbone companies into releasing different kinds of models?

 

Pichai: We will have to wait and see the details of the full executive order. But they have engaged with the industry in a very robust way. The approach really balances innovation and oversight. There are a few areas coming up where we will need more cross-industry and government coordination. It makes sense to me. Cyber[security] is a great example of that. We all have to work together. It makes full sense to me that if we have found an exploit which could impact a governmental agency, the government needs to be prepared for it.

 

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. Maybe that balance has to shift as we reach more advanced levels of technology. But to me, this seems like a prudent approach. Part of what we are doing with building SynthID, open-sourcing it and building a consortium together is an example in a different area. These things only work if we can come together as an industry. I am glad they are approaching it in that way.

 

Newton: Another safety-related question: All of the big labs are racing toward what you call recursive self-improvement — building A.I. 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?

 

Pichai: These models are getting better at coding and agentic workflows. You can see in Antigravity today, it can build a simple O.S. from scratch in over 12 hours. Those are genuinely multiple thousands of hours for somebody to do. You are seeing some of that at work today. We all, in our products, in some version or the other have agents, sub-agents and the orchestration of those agents building things together. It’s a continuum, and we are all definitely making progress. But in the way people describe R.S.I., that would represent a next level of acceleration and would have a lot of implications, but we aren’t quite there yet.

 

Newton: Is there a plan for: “Uh-oh? I mean, great news, Sundar, we just hit R.S.I.” Is there a plan to break glass, or what happens then?

 

Pichai: I think all responsible labs, if you are approaching moments like that, shouldn’t have an internal conversation at that point. It has to be a much broader conversation. We all have to avoid race conditions at those stages of A.G.I.

 

Roose: Right now, all the labs are racing to get more compute. There seems to be bottomless demand for it. They’re hoarding it wherever they can, striking deals, building their own data centers. Google is still selling access to T.P.U.s to rivals in the race. Why? Why aren’t you just keeping that for yourselves and your own models?

 

Pichai: Each is not a constraint on the other. As long as we can make enough chips, it’s not a constraint. The right way to think about it is, we have [Google DeepMind] and our first-party services. If you can think about that as a company — business and cash flows — you’re planning for that. And then you have Google Cloud, which is a business, has revenue and cash flows, and you’re making long-term plans for that. If we didn’t have Cloud, we wouldn’t be planning those chips anyway.

 

There are a lot of advantages to providing T.P.U.s to others. The fact that researchers at Anthropic are using T.P.U.s allows us to make the best next-generation hardware. By the way, we use Nvidia’s chips too; their next-generation chips are incredible, and we work with them. When you are running platforms — and I have always worked on many platforms in my life, be it Chrome or Android or Google Cloud — why would you ever open-source something or provide this technology? All that makes sense on its own merits. It allows us to stay at the frontier. Economies of scale help in various ways, and it makes a lot of sense that way.

 

Roose: The last time we had you on, we asked you about A.G.I. and your feelings about the term. At the time, you responded that it didn’t really matter whether you reached A.G.I. 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 A.G.I. in your keynote. Demis [Hassabis] did, but you did not. What’s your relationship with the term A.G.I. today, and the idea that all of this progress is building toward something singular and world-changing?

 

Pichai: There is inevitable progress toward A.G.I. that’s happening. I have long understood it, otherwise I wouldn’t have pivoted the company 10 years ago to put that technology at the heart and center of the company. All I meant by that statement was that even in the scenario where A.G.I. is going to take 10 years, the technology — which is three years out — will be so much more powerful than what we have today that I don’t want people to think that because A.G.I. is 10 years out, you don’t need to act or prepare.

 

Roose: Are you A.G.I.-pilled?

 

Pichai: I absolutely am sure that the technology is making foundational progress toward A.G.I. I am less able to predict with certainty whether it’s in the three-to-five-year time frame or the 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 closer side than not. In my 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’s. But 10 years ago on the I/O stage, I announced T.P.U.s and A.I.-first data centers. Yes, we clearly understood where this technology is headed.

 

Newton: As a last question, one of the more memorable phrases from the keynote this year came from Demis, when he said that we’re in the “foothills of the singularity.” Can you tell us concretely what that means from Google’s perspective? And should people be excited about that, or afraid, or both?

 

Pichai: I have had many conversations with Demis on this topic. In this context, he is defining “singularity” as the advent of A.G.I. If you believe that, it makes sense to you, that’s what you’re articulating. For him, that’s how he defines singularity. I think that myself and many others feel it’s important to articulate that, if that’s what you believe, because we are all at the frontier building this technology, and hopefully people are listening. It’s important as a society that we are internalizing that and getting ready for it.” [1]

 

1. Sundar Pichai Understands Why People Are Anxious About A.I.: Hard Fork. Roose, Kevin; Newton, Casey; Jones, Whitney.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. May 22, 2026.