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.
Sundar Pichai on the A.I. Race, Agentic Coding and Future of Search
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.
