Google CEO on Elon Musk, Tesla, and Waymo
00:00:00.000 | The competition is heating up. You've been friendly with Elon, even though technically
00:00:03.680 | as a competitor. What do you think about the robo-taxi efforts that Tesla is doing?
00:00:07.300 | We don't compete with Tesla directly. We are not making cars, etc., right? We are building
00:00:11.020 | L45 autonomy. We're building a Waymo driver, which is general purpose and can be used in
00:00:16.440 | many settings. They're obviously working on making Tesla self-driving too. I've just assumed it's
00:00:22.260 | a de facto that Elon would succeed in whatever he does. So that is not something I question.
00:00:28.060 | These spaces are such vast spaces. In all future scenarios, I see Tesla doing well and Waymo
00:00:34.480 | doing well. We've always been a deep technology company. Waymo is a version of building an AI
00:00:39.940 | robot that works well. This year, we've scaled up a lot and will continue scaling up in 26.
00:00:44.760 | Like we mentioned with the Neolithic package, I think it's very possible that in the quote-unquote
00:00:49.040 | AI package, when the history is written, autonomous vehicles is like the big thing that changes
00:00:54.220 | everything. Just the complete transition from manually driven to autonomous. In ways we might
00:00:58.540 | not predict, it might change the way we move about the world completely. Second and third order effects,
00:01:03.880 | as you're seeing now with Tesla, very possibly you would see internally with Alphabet, maybe Waymo,
00:01:08.340 | maybe some of the Gemini robotics stuff. Because we should remember that Waymo is a robot. It just
00:01:12.840 | happens to be on four wheels. You said that the next big thing might be in the space of robotics.
00:01:17.420 | Demis and the Google DeepMine team is very focused on Gemini robotics, right? So we are definitely building
00:01:22.360 | the underlying models. So we have a lot of investments there. And I think we are also pretty
00:01:27.260 | cutting edge in our research there. So we are definitely driving that direction. We obviously
00:01:31.560 | are thinking about applications. We are partnering with a few companies today, but it's an area I would
00:01:36.160 | say stay tuned. We are yet to fully articulate our plans outside, but it's an area we are definitely
00:01:40.800 | committed to driving a lot of progress. But I think AI ends up driving that massive progress in robotics.
00:01:45.960 | The field has been held back. I mean, hardware has made extraordinary progress. The software had been the
00:01:51.580 | challenge, but you know, with AI now and the generalized models we are building, getting them to work in the
00:01:56.400 | real world in a safe way, in a generalized way is the frontier we're pushing pretty hard on.
00:02:01.140 | Transcription by ESO. Translation by —