Sundar Pichai on the future of Waymo and the possibility of ever selling Waymo cars directly to people: "We are so far from a zero-sum construct. It's so early, and the opportunity space seems so vast to me, with so many applications for autonomous driver technology. I expect Waymo to work in a myriad of ways, including with other partners, and I expect those partners to do very well as companies on their own too. I'm very, very bullish on all of that. The Waymo team is very, very focused on scaling up what they are doing. We just crossed half a million paid rides per week, and the team is razor-focused on scaling that up. The Toronto launch is coming, along with 10 new cities this year. The next 12 months are going to be more of it in international markets, in other weather conditions, on highways, and everywhere. We are scaling up with this high safety bar we already have, driving with 95% fewer serious crashes compared to regular driving. The underlying technology we are building is so general that it has all the option values you're talking about built on top of it... If you've looked at us as a company, you've seen us build Android and mobile, even in the AI ecosystem, where we partner with a wide variety of companies. I think we will always work with the ecosystem, and I think there'll be plenty of growth for everyone." Quoted @alexeheath: Sundar Pichai on Gemini 4 and the AI compute crunch Even Google can’t get enough compute. I sit down with Google and Alphabet CEO @sundarpichai shortly after the wider release of Gemini 4 Argon to discuss its early reception, where he still wants the model to improve, and what it takes to keep Google at the frontier of AI. Pichai explains the recent leadership shakeup at Google DeepMind and why building frontier models has become an “all-consuming” job. We also get into Google’s answer to the personal agent race, how he predicts Gemini will do more work on your behalf, and whether agents will finally bring Search, Gmail, and Gemini together. I ask him about Google turning free cash flow negative, the risks in the AI infrastructure buildout, and how he plans for demand years before knowing what the models will be capable of. He explains the signals giving him confidence to keep spending and how he uses AI agents to follow model development and compute usage inside Google. Timestamps: 00:00 Gemini Argon launch reception 01:49 Model access and safety 06:20 The AI model race 08:35 Agentic breakthroughs and 2027 11:34 Recursive self-improvement 15:41 DeepMind leadership changes 19:52 Google's AI compute investments 25:20 Is AI spending sustainable? 33:18 How Sundar uses AI agents 35:35 Gemini's personal agent plans 38:37 How AI agents change the web 43:52 Google's space data centers 47:38 Waymo's expansion strategy 50:26 Wing's drone delivery plans 51:36 AI safety and regulation 55:58 Google's quantum computing bet YouTube: youtu.be/fJBSNEFdm8c Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/0cJBqm… Substack: sources.news/p/sundar-picha… Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sun… This episode's presenting sponsor is @hyperagentapp. Thanks to the show’s premiere sponsors: @Atlassian, @meetgranola, and @mercury.