Kara Swisher, author of Burn Book, spoke with Gizmodo’s Thomas Germain for the latest installment of Quartz’s video series “What’s next for…”
Watch the interview above and check out the transcript below. The transcript of their conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Kara Swisher (KS): Generative AI is a line, you know, of an era. You know how they have, whenever you have, like, dinosaurs, there’s eras or whatever. This is an era, right?
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Thomas Germain (TG): So we’re at the beginning of this really massive shift with artificial intelligence, and we’re being told there’s a, there’s a whole new way that we’re gonna be interacting with computers. And among all of the tech businesses, the one that seems most poised for a change is Google. What’s next for Google with the coming wave of AI?
KS: Oh, I think they’re gonna be huge. I think this is a new lease on life for them. Search is starting to go down, you know, that’s not how people are gonna, ‘cause people are now, AI is inside search, right? So they have so much data, but they’ve gotta be careful because of their monopoly position in search, even though it’s sort of a declining monopoly position that they have the government in its crosshair. So they’ve gotta be very careful about that. But I do think they’re poised to do a lot of things if they need to. Like they could, they have so many assets, or it’s a worldwide brand power computing power. This new AI stuff is gonna take enormous amounts of computing power. And they have it. And there’s a handful of companies, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, to a lesser extent, the others.
TG: Do you think they’re better positioned than OpenAI is to be the dominant platform?
KS: Yes. They’re, they’re hindered by regulatory issues for, but OpenAI has Microsoft as its partner and Anthropic has Amazon as its partner, so everyone’s gonna partner up, but yes, yes. Obviously they were, they’ve been slow, they were slow to cloud. I had a long discussion with Sundar, Sundar Pichai, many years ago about why didn’t you get into cloud? Well, they were using it for search, so they didn’t have the bandwidth, but what a great business. They kind of, then they got into it and did okay. They could pivot anywhere they want. It’s just a question of whether they have the, you know, the executive will to do so.
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TG: Is the business still gonna be, you know, the, the surfacing of information, which has been Google’s whole thing?
KS: Yes.
TG: Is there gonna be a bigger shift to, you know, this is an operating system style thing now?
KS: They’ve had their, like, little flirtations with cars and everything else. They still are with Waymo. I think they need to drill down into AI and that’s it. That’s, you know, they’re, it’s still search in a different way, but it’s, you know, resurfacing of information is what they do. And then selling advertising against it. Now, things will change. I think their regular search business is declining eventually. I wouldn’t mind having their set of cards at all. I mean, it’s just a question of inertia of these big companies. And that’s where, you know, the little companies like OpenAI. Google should have been at the forefront of, they were, they bought Deep Mind a million years ago. I broke that story actually. They were very early to this step. They just moved slower and more carefully because of who they are and how big they are. You know, they’re big if they move things break.
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TG: OpenAI kind of forced their hand a little bit.
KS: It did when they did. But they were there. When they bought DeepMind, everyone looked up because they were the ones that were at the forefront of this. Microsoft was at the forefront of a lot of things. And then Google ran past them, right? So that happens all the time. But now Microsoft’s recovered and they’re doing just fine, but they’re big, so they’ll be fine. You know, they’re not in danger of becoming desiccated antiques. No way. It’s not like the end of Kodak. If you’re thinking they’re Kodak, they’re not Kodak. So…
TG: Well, in terms of desiccation, what do you think about the health of the web, right? Because Google really relies on their being fresh, constant up-to-date content, but websites are kind of falling apart.
KS: They are. As an industry, that’s not how we’re gonna interact with it anymore. It’s gonna be a pull. You know, years ago there was the pull thing that, what was it called? There was a bunch of companies. It was too early and it would pull information for you. And I’m blanking on the name of it, but it was a, it was a really interesting idea. It would go get things for you. That’s the way it’s gonna be like the way retail is now. You’re not going into a Circuit City. Like you don’t remember Circuit City. You’re not going in the supermarket, you’re not going there anymore. It’s, you will maybe a little bit for convenience, but-
TG: Nostalgia.
KS: Whatever. Just like why? Like its, why should you go hunt things when you can just go, I’d like this. And then why should you go search for them? Like, it’ll know what you want and you will know what you want. Or you’ll just do it by speaking or vision or ‘I’ll take one of those’ and the screens will be big and you’ll, it’s like you’re in a store. There’s gonna be physical things, logistics, ‘cause ‘cause we’re still physical. We’re not gonna, we haven’t out of our brains yet and out of our bodies. Yet. But I think that everything that- the line I have in the book that I say over and over again, everything that can be digitized will be digitized. Period. End of story. So now what does that mean? Start to look at everything. And it’s just because we can’t digitize it now, it doesn’t mean we won’t be able to digitize it or you know, we’ll be printing livers someday. We’ll print livers. We will, we’ll be able to digitize organic material. We’ll print everything.