The history and future of AI at Google, with Sundar Pichai

As I think about the AI race in 2026, one thing that strikes me is Google has for so long had speed as the place it tries to differentiate.

And so original Google search was really fast and famously displayed the search query time within the results sort of showing off.

And then Gmail fast search compared to the competitors at the time or Chrome compared to the competitors at the time.

And now, I mean, I use all of the...

AI services for different things.

But Gemini on TPUs is just so fast.

And I'm curious how much this is part of the explicit product strategy and how you think of it, or it's much more nuanced than that.

I've always internalized speed.

Let's call it as latency for this purpose, right? And as like one of the distinguishing features of a great product.

And also almost always reflects the technical underpinnings of the product having been done well.

There's a different speed which matters too, which is the speed of shipping and iteration and release cycles.

So both are important, but you talk about latency.

It's easy to say you want latency, but you're constantly adding capabilities.

So the capability frontier is progressing.

So there's some sense of how do you balance that? So that's where it gets more complicated.

But to give an example like search, you know, I was speaking with the teams, right? Like they now have for sub teams, like latency budgets,

like in the

milliseconds.

You'll get 50% credit if, so if you ship something which, you know, shaves off three milliseconds, you earn 1.5 milliseconds for your latency budget and 1.5 milliseconds gets passed on to the user, right? And depending on what we think you're doing, some people may get a latency budget of 30 milliseconds or 10 milliseconds.

You can use it, but you have rigorous reviews against that.

But that's how much

we think it matters.

And for context, I guess humans pick it up in the low hundreds of milliseconds, is that correct, in terms of where it actually impacts? That's right, yeah,

that's right.

I think we've actually, last I checked the dashboards and the metrics, we've actually improved search latency by 30% in the last five years.