In the letter, Pichai's argument has always been positive: the company has moved forward from the original goal of "organizing information around the world". Pichai wrote: "Now we focus on building a more useful Google for everyone. We hope to provide everyone with the tools they need to improve their knowledge, health, happiness and success."
Tencent Technology News According to foreign media reports, this week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote an annual founder letter for its parent company Alphabet. His expression is similar to the content of his speech at the Google I/O conference in May this year: Google hopes to help users.
Although Pichai is not the founder, this is his second attempt to write a founder letter - the first time he wrote a founder letter was in 2015. Since then, the actual co founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have started to write founder letters respectively.
But now, Pichai is obviously the public image of the company, and also the highest level executive of Alphabet who attended to answer shareholders' questions on Wednesday.
His letter reads like a response to the increasing scrutiny by regulators, the media and employees. In the past two years, Pichai testified in Congress on political prejudice and privacy issues, and faced a labor strike because Google paid high salaries to outgoing executives accused of sexual misconduct.
The affable CEO handled the pressure calmly and elegantly because Page and Brin never appeared in the spotlight. At the same time, the US Department of Justice is preparing an antitrust investigation against Google.
The letter appeared in a document that Pichai submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday. In the letter, Pichai's argument has always been positive:
The company has moved forward from its original goal of "organizing information around the world". Pichai wrote: "Now we focus on building a more useful Google for everyone. We hope to provide everyone with the tools they need to improve their knowledge, health, happiness and success."
He wrote: "Our products are designed to save your time in all aspects." He used Google Translate, Smart Compose and other functions as examples, which helps to write emails faster.
"One of our most useful products is YouTube," he wrote, pointing out all the useful educational guidance videos that people watch on YouTube. YouTube has been heavily criticized for months. People accused the website of attracting teenagers to watch extremist content, thereby making them radical; Promote children's videos to those who have watched pornographic videos; And the unfair application of hate speech control rules. (Later, Pichai did solve these problems. He pointed out that "eliminating hate speech is not only a difficult computer science problem, but also a difficult social problem. The problematic or marginal content on YouTube only accounts for less than 1% of the total content of the platform".)
He wrote: "We hope to help you connect with the people and things you love, such as photos of family and friends, and help you cut off the connection with technology when you want. Our FamilyLink app can help you manage your children's screen time."
"We are also challenging the view that products need more data to become more helpful." This is a direct response to criticism that Google and other large digital platforms violate user privacy.
The letter continued to emphasize how Google helped people in developing countries access the Internet in a cheaper way, help local communities through housing investment, improve the quality of news and eliminate false news through the $300 million Google News Initiative news plan.
As people's censorship of Google continues to increase, Google's voice of helping users will continue to become an important tone of Google's external communication and publicity.
The following is the full text of the annual founder letter written by Google CEO Sandal Pichai:
After more than 20 years of development, Google is still a company where anything can happen. Our "beneficial neglect of the impossible" - as Larry and Sergey often like to say - is still the reason why we wake up every morning and why we like to break through the limitations of technology to solve the most difficult problems for our users.
Today, our mission to organize information around the world and make it universally available and useful is as important as 1998. Since then, we have evolved from a company that helps people find answers to a company that helps people complete tasks.
Now our focus is to build a more useful Google for everyone. We are eager to provide everyone with the tools they need to enhance their knowledge, health, happiness and success. Here are our views on this work.
Create a more useful Google
In our daily work, there are so many users turning to our products, and we have countless opportunities to help them. I always think about it from the perspective of a worker who has become a parent. Suppose you are making breakfast in the kitchen and going to work in a hurry. You suddenly realize that you forgot to make an appointment for your child's doctor. We want to help you make an appointment with a doctor, or one day, even do it on your behalf. We can also help you use Google Maps to work more effectively, or use Google Assistant Voice Assistant to book your favorite taxi service for you. In addition, we can use your favorite music to help you relax at the end of a long day.
Our products are designed to save your time in all aspects. Smart Compose can help you send email on the road, thus saving you the trouble of typing about 2 billion characters a week. Our Translate function can help you stay in a hotel or order coffee without language barrier. The "busy time" function on the search engine can let you know when your favorite movie theater needs to wait in line, while the Duplex on the Web technology will allow you to use Google Assistant voice assistant to rent a car for travel.
One of our most useful products is YouTube. Every day, people will learn new things on this platform: mend blocked sewers, master new cooking skills, learn a new language, play a new musical instrument - even prepare for job interviews or learn a new job skill. YouTube has become one of the most accessible educational platforms in the world, and it allows people to learn anything from anywhere.
In addition to saving your time or helping you learn new skills, we also want to help you connect with the people and things you love. For me, whenever I see the photos of my family, friends and dogs appear on the rotating photo screen of Google Nest Hub, I will remember what is the most important thing in life. For others, when you see your children and grandchildren in the weekly Duo chat, or when the Assistant plays your favorite song, you will enjoy the moment of surprise and joy.
Of course, there are some of the happiest moments when you don't look at the screen or hold the device at all. This is why we will help you disconnect from technology when you want, use digital welfare functions such as WindDown to help you shut down at night, or use our Family Link application to help you manage your children's screen time. We are committed to helping everyone find a sense of balance.
Find reliable and accurate information
The pursuit of knowledge is the core of our mission from the beginning. Even after more than 20 years, we still have a lot of space to develop and improve our search engine. In fact, about 15% of the query request information we see every day is information we have never seen before.
We will continue to apply the most advanced technology to the most urgent problems, so as to continue to develop our search engine. Sometimes, this means providing real-time information for flood victims, or providing jobs for returning servicemen or veterans. By introducing augmented reality directly into search engines, we are now able to display video rather than just deliver information. For example, if you are buying new shoes, you can see which pair looks best for your wardrobe.
News is another important part of the information we organize around the world. In March 2018, we launched the Google News Initiative news program, promising to provide 300 million dollars to help global journalism flourish in the digital age. One of our main concerns is to support local news, which plays an important role in our community, our democracy and our daily life. Together with McClatchy, we launched the Local Experiences localization pilot project to test new methods in the local business model and help the industry understand which methods are more effective. We also helped train 100000 journalists around the world to use digital tools, and cooperated with many news editorial offices around the world to carry out various plans to combat false information and false news during the election, such as the Verificado plan in Mexico and the Comprova plan in Brazil.
On YouTube, our team feels responsible for curbing false information, protecting children's safety, and deleting harmful content that violates our policies. Eliminating hate speech is not only a difficult computer science problem, but also a difficult social problem, because what people think acceptable is changing over time and different in different cultures. We continue to review our policies, and we know that we still have a lot of work to do in this regard. It is worth noting that the problematic or marginal content on YouTube only accounts for less than 1% of the total content on the platform. Most YouTube videos do what we always want to do: they give people a voice and opportunity to share their views, stories and expertise.
We will continue to be vigilant to prevent people from using our platform to interfere in election activities. In the past three years, we have increased the transparency of news sources on YouTube, adding tags under videos uploaded by radio and television companies that receive public or government funding. In terms of advertising, we have added a verification program, required to disclose information about election advertising, and released a transparency report on election advertising. Most importantly, during the important election period, we will continue to monitor our platform and eliminate attempts to manipulate our platform to interfere in the election. Protecting users and maintaining the fairness of our platform remain our top priorities.
Serve everyone
We believe that access to high-quality information is critical not only to our personal success, but also to the success of people and businesses around the world.
One way we serve everyone is to focus on the next 1 billion online users in India, Brazil and Nigeria. For these users, we are adjusting our core products, such as search engine, YouTube and Lens lens, to ensure that they can run on mobile phones priced at $35. In addition, we are also developing new solutions for the next generation of users, whether to help them access the bank or to ask and find answers to neighborhood questions. Usually, these customized regional products will be adopted by global users later. As far as Maps Offline and TEZ (now Google Pay) are concerned, these products were originally designed for Indians, but now they are used all over the world.
Serving everyone also means ensuring that people with disabilities can access and enjoy our products. Earlier this year, we launched several products with new tools and accessibility features, including Live Caption, which can add subtitles to video or podcast conversations. In the future, Live Relay and Euphonia will be able to help those who have difficulties in language communication, whether they have speech disorder or hearing loss.
We don't just think about it from a personal perspective. Our goal is also to help enterprises and organizations apply our most advanced technology to their most important issues - whether it is to use artificial intelligence to help ships navigate safely, to provide personalized experience for offline and online retail activities, or to use machine learning technology to help financial institutions detect fraud. Google Cloud is one of Google's biggest investment areas, and it is still a big bet for us. Helping enterprises achieve their mission is an important part of our mission. We are committed to becoming long-term and powerful technology partners.
Ensure the security of users and their data
"Serving everyone" is Google's core philosophy. Just as our mission is to create universally available and useful products, we believe that privacy and security should be equally provided to everyone in the world, no matter where you live or what type of service you are using. In order to effectively protect privacy, we have provided everyone with clear and meaningful choices in data. For a long time, we have provided functions such as Google Takeout (now Download Your Data), so that anyone can bring their data to any service they choose. Recently, we announced important new privacy features, including one click access to the privacy settings of all our major products, as well as the automatic deletion control function, which allows you to choose when to save data. To protect your data from security threats, we just introduced a security key that can provide dual authentication in Android phones.
We are also challenging the view that products need more data to become more helpful. Google has invented a new technology called Federated Learning, which allows us to train AI models to make products more intelligent without leaving your device with raw data. With Federated Learning, Gboard input methods can learn new words after thousands of people start using them, and we don't know what you are typing. In the future, the progress of AI will provide more methods to make products use less data but become more useful.
Invest in our community
In addition to the investment in products, we also made a lot of long-term investment in the community we call home.
We have three methods. The first is to help create economic activity. The Internet is connecting customers to businesses of all sizes, and Google's search and advertising tools play an important role in establishing these connections. In 2018, in the United States alone, our tools created $335 billion in economic activities for millions of enterprises, website publishers and non-profit organizations. Globally, Google Services is enabling a new generation of small businesses, application developers and YouTube creators to reach new audiences and create billions of dollars in economic value. The founder of YouTube is a next-generation media enterprise: channels with six figures or more in revenue have increased by more than 40% over last year, and created new jobs. In addition to the founders, many small businesses rely on YouTube to promote their products.
The second way for us to invest in the community is to "grow with Google", which is our initiative to help people around the world learn new digital skills, start careers and develop businesses. We hope to expand the coverage of technology and ensure that people around the world can access new opportunities. We have trained more than 43 million people globally in digital skills, and we expect that this number will rise to more than 60 million by 2022.
In the long run, the third way for us to invest in the community is to deepen our commitment. In the United States, we are preparing to invest $13 billion to expand our data centers and offices across the United States. In fact, we are developing faster outside California than in California. However, in order to ensure that our headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area is still a good place to live and work, we invested $1 billion in the Bay Area real estate. We will reuse the land currently designated as commercial and office space, and build 15000 new houses for employees of all income levels. We will also set up an investment fund of 250 million US dollars to enable developers to build at least 5000 affordable housing units in the whole market - bringing the total number to 20000. Google.org will provide an additional 50 million US dollars to non-profit organizations focusing on solving the problems of homeless and displaced persons.
Investing in communities also means doing our part to minimize our impact on our largest community - the Earth. We are the first company of the same scale to achieve 100% renewable energy for two consecutive years, which is the goal we have been committed to for a long time. We have made the energy efficiency of our data center seven times higher than that of five years ago, and we are committed to sustainable development for a long time.
Take a long-term view
Fortunately, we have an eternal mission, and the way we achieve this mission will continue to evolve. Changes at each stage are the result of careful long-term planning. We began to increase our bets in areas where we believe that the next five years, 10 years or even 20 years can bring huge returns to society.
A good example is our early bet on AI.
In 2012, Google's Brain team established a very large neural network to teach a computer to independently propose the visual concept of "cat". This is a big step forward in expanding the scale of neural networks and making them truly useful. I remember when I met with the team and listened to them talk about this milestone, and I was amazed that machine learning can really play a role.
When we begin this new computing era, we have to reconsider our computing architecture. This leads to our tensor processor (TPU), which is our customized hardware for machine learning. TPU enables us to run machine learning algorithms faster and more efficiently - it laid the foundation for another major milestone in 2016, when DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated the human Go master. At this point, I clearly realize that we are in a unique position to promote this field, because we have a very good AI research team and very strong computing power.
These early investments have enabled us to transform the company's strategy into an AI priority strategy. We have been strictly implementing this strategy in our products to better serve our users. So far, one of our clearest views on AI is that it has the greatest potential when paired with human intelligence. In terms of breast cancer detection, our latest research shows that pathologists using our algorithm are more accurate and efficient than pathologists or individual algorithms. We have seen similar progress in the early detection of lung cancer.
We believe that the artificial intelligence we have developed can complement human expertise, and we feel we have a great responsibility to achieve this. That is why last year we announced seven principles to guide our work in artificial intelligence. These are not theoretical concepts; They are specific criteria that effectively guide our research and product development and influence our business decisions. We have made AI technology universally available through our tools and open source code, which is to make organizations that use technology to improve people's lives stronger.
There are many reasons for us to remain optimistic about the development direction of science and technology. I am particularly excited about the potential of quantum computing and the world-class team engaged in quantum computing. I met this team a few weeks ago, and I'm glad to see their progress. Quantum computing is still a long-term effort for us. It gives us a chance to understand the world more deeply and thoroughly than ever before.
Google is more helpful for the future
I am proud of the work Alphabet has done to improve people's lives through science and technology, whether it is Verly and Calico's transformation of healthcare methods, Waymo and Wing's vision of future transportation, Loon's efforts to expand Internet access to more people in more places, or GV and CapitalG's efforts to help the next generation of successful companies gain resources and expertise.
This kind of cooperation - although they are still specialized and independent companies - is exactly what Larry, Sergey and I envisioned when we created Alphabet a few years ago. Let us continue to remain united in the common belief that we should use technology to serve mankind.
Of course, we still face some difficult problems - more complicated than any problems we have dealt with in the 20 years of development. We will treat them in a consistent way: focus on our users and create products that can improve their lives and the whole society. Through all this, we will continue to create value for our customers, partners and shareholders.
From the first day I entered the Mountain View Park, I knew that Google was different from any other company on the earth. Since I became CEO in 2015, my optimism has increased. This is largely due to the people I work with every day. I am lucky to lead a group of determined employees who are breaking through the limitations of technology and helping us become a better company.
But I believe the biggest reason for Google's future development is that I believe the billions of people who let us integrate into its daily life. As long as we are still developing technologies that can help all of you realize your potential, everything is possible.
Sandal Pichai
Google CEO (Tencent Technology Reviewer/Lexue)