Sundar Pichai Shares Emotional Letter to Mark Google’s 25th Anniversary

The exact date of Google’s official birthday remains unknown, as the company initially celebrated on a different day each September. However, since its eighth year, September 27 has become the accepted date. On this day, Google would release a Google Doodle on its search engine to announce the occasion. This year, the company will reach its 25th year of incorporation, and in honor of this milestone, CEO Sundar Pichai wrote a public memo reflecting on the company’s journey, its impact on technology, and its future direction. Let’s delve into the details.

Posting his post, titled “Questions, Shrugs, and What’s Next: A Quarter Century of Change,” Pichai penned a 2,400-word piece to celebrate a quarter century of Google’s existence. You can read the entire message below.

Sundar Pichai’s message on Google’s 25th anniversary

To all users of our products, employees and partners around the world:

This month, Google celebrates our 25th birthday. It’s a great privilege to reach this milestone, made possible by the people who use our products and challenge us to keep innovating, the hundreds of thousands of Googlers past and present who have contributed their talents to building these products, and our partners who believe in our mission as much as we do.

It is a time of gratitude and reflection.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how far technology has come in the last 25 years and how people adapt to it. Years ago, when I was studying in the US, my father – who was back in India – got his first email address. I was really excited for a faster (and cheaper) way to communicate with him, so I sent a message.

And then I waited…and waited. It took two days before I got this reply:

“Dear Mr. Pichai, Email received. All is well.”

Confused by the delay and formalities, I called him to see what happened. He told me that someone at his work had to pull up an email on their office computer, print it, and then deliver it to him. My dad dictated the answer, which the guy wrote down and finally typed to send back to me.

Fast forward to a few months ago: I was with my teenage son. He saw something interesting, quickly took pictures and shared them with his friends. Then they exchanged a few messages, and it all seemed faster than the time it would take to pull out the phone.

How I communicated with my father all those years ago compared to how my son communicates today shows how much change can happen between generations. Technology that takes years to adapt to is second nature to our children. Ideas that my dad fancied as science fiction — receiving a phone call from a watch or telling your car to play your favorite song — make my kids shrug.

Those shrugs give me a lot of hope for the future. They set the bar high for what the next generation builds and invents… and I can’t wait to see what their kids shrug off.

The essential truth of innovation is that the moment you push the boundaries of technology, it soon goes from extraordinary to ordinary. This is why Google has never taken our success for granted.

It all started with a search

Larry and Sergey first wrote about our mission 25 years ago: to organize the world’s knowledge and make it universally accessible and useful. They had an ambitious vision of a new kind of search engine that would help people make sense of the waves of information moving online. The product they developed, Google Search, helped billions of people around the world get answers to their questions.

For a few years, I was one of those people who experienced Google like everyone else on the web. I remember being amazed at Google’s ability to find the best answer to the most esoteric of questions, from a small detail buried on a store’s customer service page to an obscure soccer rule.

My questions to Google have evolved over time: “How do you fix a dripping faucet?” “Fastest route to Stanford Hospital?” “Ways to soothe a crying baby?” And around spring 2003, perhaps: “How to get a Google interview?” And over time, Google got better at responding to them.

It’s been inspiring to see what people have done in response to their questions, whether it’s finding healthcare or comfort during difficult times, learning new skills, finding new career paths, or starting new businesses. The idea that a student in rural Indonesia could have the same knowledge as a Stanford professor was revolutionary and has changed our lives and our world for the better. It has opened up access to education and entrepreneurship more than anything before or since.

Search also laid the foundation for Google’s economic impact beyond our own walls. Our advertising platform and tools started from a premise as simple as Haku itself: to help companies reach customers who are already looking for the products and services they offer. It was a platform that particularly appealed to small businesses, such as a lobster mail-order company that was the first to sign up. And like search itself, the ability for any business to advertise online has been truly transformative, helping millions of businesses become part of the digital economy.

A quarter of a century of questions

Search is still at the core of our mission, and it remains our biggest moonlighter, with much more to do.

Of course, Google is more than just a search box these days. We have 15 Google products, each serving more than half a billion people and businesses, and six with more than 2 billion users.

Like most Google searches, all products started with a question. In Gmail, it was Could we offer 1GB of storage for each person? Back in 2004, when Gmail was released, the storage space was over 100 times larger than most other free online email services offered!

Then, a few years later, we saw an opportunity to vastly improve web browsers—and in turn, the web—for use by people everywhere. So with Chrome, we asked: Could we build a browser that made the web better with simplicity, speed, and security at its core? Right before launch, I had my own question: are people using this?

YouTube dared to ask: what if we gave everyone the opportunity to share what they know with the world? And today it has become a powerful platform for learning and knowledge.

The questions have kept coming, and we’ve kept improving and expanding our products with new answers: What if Google Maps lets people see every street in the world in detail? What if we built a translation tool that allows people to access information and communicate in multiple languages? What if you could search and find all your old photos by simply describing what you want to see?

We have also asked ourselves how best to share our tools, breakthroughs and infrastructure with others. Google was built from the ground up on the cloud, even though we only started our cloud business in 2008. Today, Google Cloud has become one of the largest enterprise companies in the world. Partners across industries are using Google technology to improve customer support and supply chain efficiency, reduce their carbon footprint, build new applications, and get more done with AI. Like our advertising clients before, Cloud’s partners work better, grow faster and create jobs with our help.

Of course, not all the questions we asked ended up being successful. In any 25-year journey, you take a few pieces, learn lessons, and work to do better. Remember Google Wave?

We have also faced difficult questions about our future as a company. In the 21st century, the question was how long can the web really last? In the 2010s, people asked if we could adapt to the age of mobile computing and is search “over?” Each time we have responded by coming back even stronger. We have done this by directing a special focus on our mission, a belief in applying profound information technology to improve people’s lives and a healthy disregard for the impossible.

A healthy disregard for the impossible

This healthy indifference is the reason we have been able to take on problems that others could not – or would not. For example, there was this impossible idea of putting a powerful computer in everyone’s pocket, regardless of income or Internet connection. Today, Android runs on 3 billion devices worldwide, from the latest foldable phones to entry-level phones. It has been at the heart of our efforts to make the internet more accessible to everyone, and it has inspired other revolutionary products. Likewise, Chromebooks made computing available to schools around the world. And Google Pixel brings the best of our latest technology—machine learning-based cameras, speech recognition, transcription capabilities, tensor chips, and more—right into people’s hands.

Which brings us to artificial intelligence. Google has invested in artificial intelligence almost since the beginning. We were among the first to use machine learning in our products since the early 2000s to correct spelling, improve ad quality, and show suggestions and recommendations.

Then, in the early 2010s, there was real excitement around deep neural networks. In 2012, a few of us attended a presentation in a conference room near Charlie’s, the main campus coffee shop. I remember watching in amazement as the research team showed us advances in image recognition driven by a breakthrough in neural networks. That was the first moment I thought to myself: this really changes everything!

I had a similar feeling when I saw the groundbreaking interdisciplinary research taking place at DeepMind focused on understanding the nature of intelligence. This progress deeply influenced my thinking when I became CEO in 2015 that Google should turn itself into an AI-first company.

More questions followed. How to power this new generation of computing? So we invented Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, which produced dramatic 30-80x performance improvements for machine learning compared to other hardware at the time, and launched the AlphaGo computer that beat Go world champion Lee Sedol in 2016. Around the same time, we published in 2017, our seminal Transformer paper, which created the neural network architecture that underlies most generative AI and large language models today.

Many of these technological breakthroughs have led to some of our most incredible product innovations. Search results for complex queries became much more useful thanks to major language models such as MUM and BERT. We’ve created completely new ways for people to express what they’re looking for with voice, images, and even asking about what they see using multisearch. Now, creative AI is helping us redesign our core products in exciting ways—from the new Search Generative Experience (SGE) to Gmail’s Help Me Write service. And earlier this year we released Bard, an early experiment that allows humans to collaborate with generative AI.

My favorite moments are seeing how our products can make a difference in people’s lives: Whether it’s a busy parent taking a photo of their craft box and using Bard to inspire their kids for a rainy day project; a traveler using Lens to translate a train schedule in a foreign country; or, more specifically, a family who can hear the voice of a man with ALS thanks to our research on speech recognition and synthesis.

Designing products that help people on a large scale is both a privilege and a responsibility. People have their own questions: can we trust these new technologies? We think deeply about how to build responsible technology from the ground up, whether it’s keeping everyone’s information secure or protecting people online from bad actors.

This also includes engaging in important conversations about how these technologies are shaping our society, and then working together to find answers. AI is a key part of this. While we are excited about AI’s potential to benefit people and society, we understand that AI, like any early technology, creates complexities and risks. The development and use of artificial intelligence must take these risks into account and help to develop the technology responsibly. The AI Principles we published in 2018 are an important part of how we do this. These principles raise questions such as: Is it good for people and good for society, or can it lead to harm in some way? They also shape our product development and artificial intelligence applications and guide us in finding solutions to emerging problems. For example, just last week we introduced SynthID, a tool for watermarking and identifying images generated by artificial intelligence. It helps to solve the important problem of transparency. We will continue to work with experts and the community to learn and improve.

Look forward

As we look forward, I’ve been reflecting on the commitment from our original founder’s letter in 2004: “to develop services that improve the lives of as many people as possible – to do things that matter.”

With the help of artificial intelligence, we have the opportunity to do things that matter on an even larger scale.

We are just beginning to see what the next wave of technology is capable of and how quickly it can evolve. One million people already use creative AI to write and create in Google Workspace. Flood forecasts now cover places where more than 460 million people live. A million researchers have used the AlphaFold database, which covers 200 million predictions of protein structures, helping to reduce plastic pollution, fight antibiotic resistance, fight malaria and more. We have also shown how artificial intelligence can help the aviation industry reduce emissions from aircraft, an important tool in the fight against climate change.

Still, there is much more to come. Over time, AI will be the biggest technological change we will see in our lifetime. It’s bigger than the migration from desktop to mobile, and may be bigger than the Internet itself. It is a fundamental rewiring of technology and an incredible accelerator of human ingenuity.

Making AI more useful for everyone and implementing it responsibly is the most important way to fulfill our mission for the next 10 years and beyond.

And now AI is empowering us and others to ask questions like:

How can every student have a personal tutor in any language and on any subject?

How could we give entrepreneurs the opportunity to develop new forms of clean energy?

What tools could we invent to help people design and create new products and grow new businesses?

How can sectors like transport or agriculture be reimagined?

How can we help communities predict and prepare for natural disasters?

As these new frontiers become visible, we have a new call to act boldly and responsibly to improve the lives of as many as possible and to continue asking these big questions.

We are looking for answers to the extraordinary development of technology in the next 25 years.

And in 2048, if a teenager somewhere in the world looks at everything we’ve built with AI and shrugs, we’ll know we’ve succeeded. And then back to work.

Thanks for a great 25,

– Sundar Pichai