Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:21:29 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:21:29] S0: Yeah. It's quite confusing as an outsider, but I get it. Is everything you're doing in Labs now AI based? Is there anything non-AI driven in Labs now? [00:21:40] S1: Yeah, it's all AI driven right now for sure. When we started four or five years ago, we had a few other areas we were exploring and we made the call, at least for the foreseeable future, go all in on AI. We don't just do software stuff though. I mean, Google Beam is one of the projects we're working on is this incredible kind of magic mirror that can create a 3D version. We should get you one. [00:21:41] S0: I'll take it. [00:22:04] S1: Where you can kind of talk to someone almost like they're a hologram on the other side. [00:22:04] S0: Like you're seeing them. [00:22:09] S1: Yeah. So we are exploring other adjacent things to AI. You could consider that almost like AI hardware in a way. [00:22:18] S0: I'll take it. Thank you. I'll send you my address. So it feels like consumer right now is in a really fun place where there's always been the sense of consumer's dead. There's nothing you can do. Facebook got on Google. There's no way to compete against these juggernauts that have taken the consumer world, but AI feels like it's unlocking a lot of opportunity in consumer. I'm curious what your hypothesis is for where a major breakthrough might happen in a consumer app.
00:22:45 · Josh Woodward
[00:22:45] S1: Yeah, I feel like consumer is one of the most exciting, competitive, all the things happening right now. So it feels completely opposite to me from that kind of view. A couple of areas I think that are kind of interesting. I mean, one, I think there's a big question. We talked a little bit earlier of just where's entertainment going to go? Are we going to be looking at different types of feeds forever or are there ways that this technology can bring us maybe closer together in the real world or do things with other people? I mean, there's different views on where that could go, more around bots or more around people. And so I think that's very interesting space. I think we're watching right before us now, the entire messaging chat space felt like, hey, that was sort of maybe solved. There's lots of different experiments happening on that right now, both inside Google and outside. So that feels like a whole nother area that maybe is no longer as fixed as it once felt. And then maybe the third one I would throw out is I still feel like going back again to the problems, what are some of the big problems people face in the world? And I think what are things that are super scarce? Time on earth, how much money people have and how they can save money. These kind of memories or experiences that people can have kind of IRL together and that kind of thing. So I do feel like there's maybe new consumer products to be built that can go after a lot of that stuff that whether it takes the form factor of a chatbot or a personal agent or whatever that's going to look like, I think it's kind of yet to be invented in a lot of ways.
00:24:31 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:24:31] S0: Okay. Let me ask you a spicy question along these lines. I'm so curious to get your take. So it feels like every AI assistant app that's launching these days basically sucks in Gmail and Google Calendar and Docs, all the Google data, all this juicy Google stuff, connects and does all these magical things with it. Within Google, I cannot do any of these things. It's so hard to build anything. First of all, you may be working on AI assistant, but there's nothing there yet as far as I can see. And then just generally, it feels like everyone's just taking all this juicy data and doing magical things with it and Google hasn't. What's kept you guys from doing something like that? Is it privacy concerns? Is it orgs bureaucracy stuff? Is it coming? What can you say?
00:25:19 · Josh Woodward
[00:25:19] S1: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So there's parts of it out there today. If you're in Gemini, in Gemini Spark, you can actually connect all that stuff and it's quite powerful. I think where we're iterating on that though is we've been in a world where even if you look at some of the other competitors, they're different modes almost that you go into. And I think the lesson even from the last couple of weeks is forget the modes and toggles, just like one prompt box, tell it what you want and it just does stuff for you. So that's definitely not only where we're headed, where others are or headed. I think that's kind of a broader, almost like UX simplification happening across the industry. On the data bits there, it's interesting because actually one of the main things people will ping me about or others is like, "Oh man, Google, I've got all my stuff with you. Just make the thing work." And there's a lot of reluctance actually to be connecting it to a lot of other sort of competitor products. So watch this space. We hear you loud and clear. There's a lot of work if you go online and just look under personal intelligence is sort of the way we think about this stuff is you want a Gemini that is personal, proactive, powerful, that sort of works for you. And so that's been the vision for the last kind of year or so that we're headed towards. And there's a lot of stuff we're playing with right now that will be out soon.
00:26:51 · Lenny Rachitsky, Josh Woodward
[00:26:51] S0: All right. I'm excited. It just feels like, yeah, I have so many little schedules and things running within my email. I'm just like, "Man, why isn't Google just doing this?" It does feel that the event you all have is distribution. So once something happens, similar to Muse recently, it's going to be very easy to grow it and convince people to use it similar to within AI mode. So anyway, okay, I'm excited. Things are happening. [00:27:16] S1: Things are definitely happening. [00:27:19] S0: So going a different direction, what do you think is under-hyped in AI right now? And what do you think is over-hyped, if anything is over-hyped?
00:27:27 · Josh Woodward
[00:27:27] S1: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Under-hyped, I was thinking a lot about this over the summer. I ended up writing a doc internally just around Labs principles of how and almost like why are we building what we build? And so maybe the under-hype thing is more of a discussion around principles, values. I believe very strongly, whether you're at Google or a startup founder or anywhere in between, you speak through your products and your products actually represent and almost encode those principles. And so I wish there was a lot more discussion in the industry happening around that and what kinds of things do we want to build? What kind of future do we want? So anyway, that would be my under-hyped one because I think there could be more of that. I think the over-hyped one, I think I've been saying this maybe for a year now, but I still think it's over-hyped, model benchmarks. And I still, a lot of friends at a lot of Labs and everyone's still looking at the same set of benchmarks for the most part. But I think where I grew up and where I'm from, and I guess how I think about product development is most people in the world are never, ever, ever going to care about an Elo rating. They may not even know how to pronounce Elo. It just doesn't matter. And so that's where I get back to a lot of, I feel like the talk in AI right now is about speeds and feeds and benchmarks. And these are proxies obviously for where things are and capabilities. But I still feel like sometimes as an industry, it can over rotate to that and lose sight of why is this useful to someone and what's the product or the feature that's going to deliver real value to help people? So anyway, those would be my over-unders.