Sundar Pichai stood on stage in Mountain View on 19 May to deliver a simple message about the future of Google and how they will compete in the AI race. He is betting the entire company on a conversational future, even though it is clearly a very costly and difficult bet for them to make against fierce rivals.
It is a huge risk. Now he plans to spend $190 billion this year alone to build the massive data centers needed to power these new tools for every single user on Earth.
The new "Ask YouTube" tool changes how people search for video by letting them ask complex questions instead of typing short and simple keywords into a box. It reads the video content.
So a parent teaching a child to ride a bike can now ask for specific tips on making the transition from a balance bike to a pedal bike. The AI finds the exact moment where the teacher explains hand brakes and builds a comparison table for the user to read on the screen.
It is very fast. But Pichai says this will roll out across the U.S. this summer because the site is no longer just a simple and static search engine for video.
Then there is "Docs Live," a tool that lets you speak your documents into existence without ever having to touch a keyboard or a computer mouse. He showed it off.
During a career day demo, the AI pulled a resume from Drive and coordinated logistics from a personal Gmail account for the presenter on the stage. It wrote talking points and formatted tables while Pichai told the crowd that Google wants people to work much faster than they do right now.
It did the boring work. Or consider that the tool hits Gmail and Keep for paid subscribers this summer, though the hardware costs behind these features are truly staggering for the company.
Google spent $31 billion just two years ago, but they now expect to spend six times that amount on new server hardware and custom chips. So they need more power.
The scale of this shift is hard to grasp for many investors who worry about the high burn rate of the company in the current market. Yet Google feels it has no choice if it wants to keep pace with rivals like Microsoft and the fast-moving team at the OpenAI lab.
They are moving fast. And they are spending big to stay on top.
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