Pichai: Look these are important issues, which I’m sure Congress, the Supreme Court, everyone is going to be in –
Sorkin: I think they will, but they if they do they’ll be late. That’s the thing, right? This already moved past us. So all this information has been hoovered up and people have learned from that. And, to the extent that there are folks who use your services and other services they’re beneficiaries of that. But it’s not clear that the original creator is the beneficiary right now.
Content licensing. The conversation later turned to the future of the “blue link economy,” with Sorkin asking whether Google would send “checks to creators that created even an idea or a fact that you were able to collect along the way?”
Pichai pointed out it licensed content from Reddit, the Associated Press and New York Times. But clearly, Google is not licensing all the content it “hoovers” up. Here’s that exchange:
Sorkin: …Do you see a day where instead of the Blue Link economy, if you will, that you actually are going to be sending checks to creators that created even an idea or a fact that you were able to collect along the way?
Pichai: I mean down the line well we are licensing content for AI today. We are we are doing that where we see value.
Sorkin: …One of the things is fascinating to me. You’re licensing data for example from Reddit right? But what’s so interesting about that is the folks on Reddit are just typing away for free. It’s a fascinating business model.
Pichai: Look, we license data from Reddit. We license data from AP. We license data from New York Times. We do it across the world in variety of ways. But I think over time, will there be models by which people can create? There’ll be a marketplace in the future, I think. There’ll be creators who will create for AI models or something like that and get paid for it. I definitely think you know that’s that’s part of the future and people will figure it out.
The video. Building the Future: Sundar Pichai on A.I., Regulation and What’s Next for Google (New York Times Events on YouTube).