I was going to radically change. It's tough to think ten years ahead. You can paralyze yourself by trying to predict a decade into the future. Fortunately, we're in a moment where you can focus on just a year ahead, and the curve of progress is so steep. It's exciting to think about how much can happen in only a year.
In the past, you might have needed to envision five years out, but now, the models will be dramatically different even after a single year. Riding the curve itself is exciting, and things will continue to evolve. This is an expansionary moment. What many people underestimate is that it doesn't feel like a zero-sum game to me. The value of what people will be able to do is also on an incredible curve.
If you see things as a zero-sum game, it looks difficult. It can become that way if you're not innovating or your product isn't evolving. But as long as you're at the cutting edge and doing those things—like we are with search and Gemini—it's different. There will be overlap in some ways, and in other ways, there will be profound divergence. I think it's good to have both, and we should embrace it.
When we talk about search and where it's headed, I'm reminded that about a year ago, in the spring or summer of 2025, the sentiment toward Google was very negative. The prevailing view was that search was finished, the core business was under attack, and Google was struggling. The stock was trading around $150 a share. Now, people realize that's silly. Google has depth at every layer, from applications to models to TPUs, as well as projects like Waymo, YouTube, and all the bets we're making.
What did investors, as a proxy for informed sentiment, misunderstand a year ago? To me, it was clear that the Overton window had shifted. I felt the company was built for this moment. The vertical approach wasn't an accident; it was intentional. By then, we were already on the seventh version of TPUs. As far back as 2016, we announced TPUs and talked about building AI data centers. The company was already operating in an AI-first way, and we had deeply internalized this shift.
We were behind in terms of frontier LLM models, but we had all the internal capabilities. We just needed to execute to meet the moment. The exciting part was having research teams, infrastructure teams, and platforms, and investing with intention in many businesses. Suddenly, we had one common technology that could accelerate all our businesses—Search, YouTube, Cloud, Waymo—all relying on progress in this area. It was a very leveraged way to make progress.
I understood this, and to the earlier point, I didn't view it as a zero-sum moment at all. I felt like everything would scale up tenfold, and there would be room for others. Looking back, Amazon has done well since Google appeared, and Facebook too. We often underestimate the growth potential of how all these things work. As a company, we need to keep improving, and that's what we're focused on.
