Tag Archives: A message from our CEO

Te ofrecemos más opciones sustentables con Google

El cambio climático ya no es una amenaza lejana, sino algo cada vez más local y personal. En todo el mundo, los incendios forestales, las inundaciones y otras condiciones climáticas afectan nuestra salud, nuestras economías y nuestro futuro juntos en el planeta. Necesitamos soluciones urgentes y significativas para abordar este desafío apremiante. Es por eso que el año pasado nos comprometimos a alcanzar, para el año 2030, el ambicioso objetivo de operar nuestros campus y centros de datos con energía libre de carbono de forma permanente.

Las empresas no son las únicas que se preguntan qué más podemos hacer para ayudar al planeta; cada vez más, las personas también se hacen esas preguntas. Por eso, hoy compartimos varias maneras nuevas en las que las personas pueden usar los productos de Google para tomar decisiones sustentables. Entre ellas, presentamos nuevas funciones para reservar vuelos o comprar electrodomésticos que tienen una huella de carbono más baja, un programa de Nest para apoyar la energía limpia en el hogar y nuevas rutas ecológicas en Google Maps, que comienzan a implementarse hoy. Y cuando las personas acudan a la Búsqueda de Google con preguntas sobre el cambio climático, mostraremos información fidedigna de fuentes como las Naciones Unidas, además de las fuentes de noticias existentes que actualmente presentamos en los resultados. Estos esfuerzos forman parte de nuestro objetivo de ayudar a mil millones de personas a tomar decisiones más sustentables para 2022.

Ahora se podrán ver las emisiones de carbono por asiento para cada vuelo en Google Flights.

Viaja y compra de manera más sustentable

Estamos agregando nuevas herramientas para ayudar a tomar decisiones sobre viajes: desde qué vuelos reservar hasta dónde hospedarse. Con un lanzamiento global, ahora incluímos información sobre emisiones de carbono en Google Flights. Podrás ver las emisiones de carbono asociadas por asiento a cada vuelo y encontrar al instante opciones con menos emisiones. Y cuando busques hoteles, verás información sobre los esfuerzos de sustentabilidad, desde la reducción de desechos y las medidas de conservación del agua hasta las certificaciones Green Key o EarthCheck obtenidas.

También ayudamos a las personas a tomar decisiones más sustentables cuando compran, comenzando por los electrodomésticos. Cuando busques productos que consuman mucha energía, como hornos, lavavajillas o calentadores de agua, las sugerencias en la pestaña Compras te ayudarán a limitar la búsqueda a opciones rentables y sustentables.

Apoyando la energía limpia en el hogar

Desde hace más de una década, los termostatos Nest ayudan a ahorrar energía en casa. Hoy damos un paso más conun nuevo servicio llamado Nest Renew. Con una función llamada Energy Shift, los termostatos Nest compatibles pueden ayudar a los usuarios a cambiar automáticamente el uso de electricidad para calefacción y enfriamiento a los momentos en los que la energía es más limpia o menos costosa. Para aquellos que quieran ayudar más a apoyar el crecimiento de la energía limpia, ofrecemos una opción de suscripción paga, Renew Premium, que igualará el consumo estimado de electricidad de combustibles fósiles de los usuarios en el hogar con créditos de energía renovable generados a partir de plantas solares y eólicas de EE.UU.

Nos movemos con mayor sustentabilidad

Viajar en auto es una de las decisiones con mayor generación de carbono que las personas toman a diario. A partir de hoy en EE.UU., y en Europa en 2022, Google Maps te permitirá elegir la ruta con menor cantidad de emisiones de carbono, en el caso que no sea la ruta más rápida. Estimamos que esto podría ahorrar más de un millón de toneladas de emisiones de carbono por año, el equivalente a retirar más de 200,000 automóviles de la carretera, además de permitir a los usuarios ahorrar dinero gracias a la reducción del consumo de combustible.

Puedes escoger la ruta con menor emisiones de carbono en Google Maps.

También estamos trabajando para asegurarnos que los autos que permanezcan en la carretera sean ecológicos. En la Búsqueda de Google, estamos haciendo que sea más sencillo ver las opciones de vehículos híbridos y eléctricos, compararlas con los modelos a gasolina y encontrar descuentos para que sepas el costo real antes de comprar. Estas funciones se lanzarán en EE.UU. este año, y habrá más en 2022.

Por supuesto que, a menudo, la opción más sustentable simplemente no involucra al automóvil. Es por eso que presentamos funciones de navegación más sencillas para los ciclistas en Maps y facilitamos la búsqueda de bicicletas y scooters compartidos en más de 300 ciudades de todo el mundo.

Inteligencia artificial para semáforos más eficientes

Las primeras investigaciones indican que la inteligencia artificial puede ayudar a las ciudades a hacer que sus semáforos sean más eficientes haciendo que cada ruta sea más ecológica, sin importar el medio de transporte.

Las primeras investigaciones indican que la inteligencia artificial puede ayudar a las ciudades a hacer que sus semáforos sean más eficientes haciendo que cada ruta sea más ecológica, sin importar el medio de transporte.

Al mismo tiempo, buscamos formas de hacer que las rutas sean más eficientes en toda una ciudad, con investigaciones iniciales donde se utiliza inteligencia artificial para optimizar la eficiencia de los semáforos. Pusimos a prueba esta investigación en Israel para predecir las condiciones de tráfico y mejorar los tiempos en los que cambian las luces de los semáforos, y observamos una reducción de entre el 10% y el 20% en el combustible y el tiempo de demora en las intersecciones. Nos entusiasma el potencial de estas pruebas y estamos en conversaciones para expandirnos a Río de Janeiro y otras ciudades.

La nube más limpia de la industria

Aparte de a los individuos, ayudamos a clientes empresariales como Whirlpool, Etsy, HSBC, Unilever y Salesforce a desarrollar nuevas soluciones en función de los desafíos específicos del cambio climático que enfrentan, de modo que puedan beneficiarse con la nube más limpia de la industria. Hace poco, lanzamos herramientas para ayudar a las empresas a elegir regiones más limpias donde ubicar sus recursos de Google Cloud. Y la próxima semana, en Google Cloud Next '21, anunciaremos más formas en las que cada empresa puede construir un futuro más sustentable.

Más sustentabilidad con Google

En todos estos esfuerzos, nuestro objetivo es hacer que la opción sustentable sea una elección más fácil. En el nivel individual, estas opciones pueden parecer pequeñas, pero cuando las multiplicas en todos nuestros productos, equivalen a grandes mejoras. Necesitaremos eso y más para prevenir las peores consecuencias del cambio climático. Seguiremos trabajando para generar formas en las que nuestros productos puedan ayudar.

Giving you more sustainable choices with Google

Climate change is no longer a distant threat — it’s increasingly local and personal. Around the world, wildfires, flooding and other extreme weather continue to affect our health, our economies and our future together on our planet. We need urgent and meaningful solutions to address this pressing challenge. That’s why last year we committed to bold action to run our data centers and campuses on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030.

Companies aren’t the only ones asking what more we can do to help the planet — increasingly people are asking themselves those questions, too. So today we’re sharing several new ways people can use Google’s products to make sustainable choices. Among them, we’re introducing new features to book flights or purchase appliances that have lower carbon footprints, a Nest program to support clean energy from home, and eco-friendly routing on Google Maps — which is rolling out today. And when people come to Google Search with questions about climate change, we’ll show authoritative information from sources like the United Nations, in addition to the existing news sources that we currently raise up in the carousel. It’s all part of our goal to help one billion people make more sustainable choices by 2022.

You can now see carbon emissions per seat for every flight in Google Flights.

Travel and shop more sustainably

We’re adding new features to help make decisions about travel — from what flights to book to where to stay. Launching globally today, we’re bringing carbon emissions information to Google Flights. You’ll be able to see associated carbon emissions per seat for every flight, and quickly find lower-carbon options. And when you search for hotels, you’ll see information on their sustainability efforts, from waste reduction and water conservation measures to whether they’re Green Key or EarthCheck certified.

We’re also helping people make more sustainable choices when they shop, starting with home appliances. When you search for energy-intensive products like furnaces, dishwashers or water heaters, suggestions in the Shopping tab will help narrow your search to cost-effective and sustainable options.

Supporting clean energy from home

For over a decade, Nest thermostats have helped people save energy at home. Today we are taking these efforts a step further with a new service called Nest Renew. Using a feature called Energy Shift, compatible Nest thermostats can help users automatically shift electricity usage for heating and cooling to times when energy is cleaner or less expensive. For those who want to do more to help support the growth of clean energy, we will offer a paid subscription option, Renew Premium, that will match your fossil fuel electricity at home with high-quality renewable energy credits generated from the same projects in Google's energy portfolio.

Getting around more sustainably

Traveling by car is one of the more carbon-intensive choices people make on a daily basis. Starting today in the U.S., and in Europe in 2022, Google Maps will let you choose the most fuel-efficient route if it isn’t already the fastest one. We estimate that this could save over one million tons of carbon emissions per year — the equivalent of removing over 200,000 cars from the road — and save you money by reducing fuel consumption.

You can choose the most eco-friendly route in Google Maps.

We're also working to make sure the cars that remain on the road are eco-friendly. On Search, we're making it easier to see hybrid and electric vehicle options, compare them against gas-powered models, and find rebates so you know the true cost before you buy. These features will start to roll out in the U.S. this year, with more to come in 2022.

Of course, the most sustainable choice often doesn't involve a car at all. That’s why we’re introducing lite navigation for cyclists on Maps, and making it simpler to find bikes and scooter shares in over 300 cities around the world.

AI for more efficient traffic lights

Illustration of an intersection showing cars, a stoplight and roadways.

Early research indicates that AI can help cities make their traffic lights more efficient, making every route more eco-friendly no matter the car.

At the same time, we’re finding ways to make routes more efficient, across an entire city, with early research into using artificial intelligence to optimize the efficiency of traffic lights. We’ve been piloting this research in Israel to predict traffic conditions and improve the timing of when traffic lights change. So far, we are seeing a 10-20% reduction in fuel consumption and delay time at intersections. We’re excited to expand these pilots to Rio de Janeiro and beyond.

Cleanest cloud in the industry

We’re also helping business customers like Whirlpool, Etsy, HSBC, Unilever and Salesforce develop new solutions for the specific climate change challenges they face, and benefit from the cleanest cloud in the industry. We recently launched tools to help businesses choose cleaner regions to locate their Google Cloud resources. And next week at Google Cloud Next ‘21, we’ll announce more ways every company can choose to be more sustainable.

More sustainable with Google

In all these efforts, our goal is to make the sustainable choice an easier choice. At the individual level, these choices may seem small, but when people have the tools to make them at scale, they equal big improvements. We’ll need nothing less to avert the worst consequences of climate change, and we’ll continue to find ways our products can help.

Extending our voluntary return to office

Our CEO, Sundar Pichai, sent the following email to Google employees earlier this morning. The email has been edited to remove internal links.

Hi Googlers,

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a humbling challenge for all of us and I continue to be impressed by the way our teams are navigating through it. In spite of these challenges, I’m happy to say that a large number of offices globally are already open for business, and we are welcoming back tens of thousands of Googlers on a voluntary basis. Given that conditions around the world are still highly variable, I wanted to share how we’re planning to approach the next few months:

  • First, as offices continue to reopen, we hope to see more teams coming together where possible, whether it be for regular team meetings, brainstorming sessions around a whiteboard, or outdoor socials. For some locations, conditions are starting to improve, yet in many parts of the world the pandemic continues to create uncertainty. Acknowledging that, we’ll extend our global voluntary return-to-office policy through January 10, 2022 to give more Googlers flexibility and choice as they ramp back. 

  • Beyond January 10, we will enable countries and locations to make determinations on when to end voluntary work-from-home based on local conditions, which vary greatly across our offices. To make sure everyone has ample time to plan, you’ll have a 30-day heads-up before you’re expected back in the office.

  • Finally, encouraging Googlers to rest and recharge during this time remains a big priority so we will plan two more global reset days next quarter: Oct 22 and Dec 17. 

The road ahead may be a little longer and bumpier than we hoped, yet I remain optimistic that we will get through it together. It’s heartening to see Googlers starting to come back to more offices globally. The ability to reconnect in person has been re-energizing for many of us, and will make us even more effective in the weeks and months ahead. Thanks for all the great work thus far; look forward to a busy Q4 as we continue to find new ways to be helpful to people everywhere. 

-Sundar

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Vaccines and our return-to-office plans

Sundar sent the following email to Google employees earlier this morning. The email has been edited to remove internal links. 

Hi everyone,

I hope you are all taking good care. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve put the wellbeing of our Google community front and center. We’ve done this while also taking care of our customers and partners, launching over 200 new products and features to help people and businesses navigate this difficult time. 

In March of 2020, we made the early decision to send employees home to slow down the spread of COVID. Since then, we’ve extended our Carer’s Leave coverage to help employees care for loved ones. We’ve continued to cover the full wages of on campus workers who couldn't perform their jobs because of office closures. And, we’ve made sure that Googlers and our extended workforce have access to vaccines as soon as they are available locally. Additionally, thanks to the generosity of Googlers and support from Google.org, we've helped Gavi to fully vaccinate over 1 million people in low-and middle-income countries globally. 

Even as the virus continues to surge in many parts of the world, it’s encouraging to see very high vaccination rates for our Google community in areas where vaccines are widely available. This is a big reason why we felt comfortable opening some of our offices to employees who wanted to return early. And I have to say it’s been great to see Googlers brainstorming around whiteboards and enjoying meals in cafes again in the many offices that have already re-opened globally. 

Getting vaccinated is one of the most important ways to keep ourselves and our communities healthy in the months ahead. As we look toward a global return to our offices, I wanted to share two key updates:

  • First, anyone coming to work on our campuses will need to be vaccinated. We’re rolling this policy out in the U.S. in the coming weeks and will expand to other regions in the coming months. The implementation will vary according to local conditions and regulations, and will not apply until vaccines are widely available in your area. You’ll get guidance from your local leads about how this will affect you, and we’ll also share more details on an exceptions process for those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other protected reasons.

  • Second, we are extending our global voluntary work-from-home policy through October 18.We are excited that we’ve started to re-open our campuses and encourage Googlers who feel safe coming to sites that have already opened to continue doing so. At the same time, we recognize that many Googlers are seeing spikes in their communities caused by the Delta variant and are concerned about returning to the office. This extension will allow us time to ramp back into work while providing flexibility for those who need it. We’ll continue watching the data carefully and let you know at least 30 days in advance before transitioning into our full return to office plans. For those of you with special circumstances, we will soon be sharing expanded temporary work options that will allow you to apply to work from home through the end of 2021. We’re also extending Expanded Carer’s Leave through the end of the year for parents and caregivers.

I know that many of you continue to deal with very challenging circumstances related to the pandemic. While there is much that remains outside of our control, I’m proud of the way we continue to take care of each other while helping people, businesses and communities through these difficult times.  

I hope these steps will give everyone greater peace of mind as offices reopen. Seeing Googlers together in the offices these past few weeks filled me with optimism, and I’m looking forward to brighter days ahead. 

-Sundar

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A new Android smartphone and 5G partnership with Jio

Editor’s note: Today, we announced the next steps in our partnership with Jio Platforms, including a new, affordable Jio smartphone built with an optimized version of Android OS and a new 5G collaboration powered by Google Cloud. The following is adapted from remarks delivered by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, at Reliance Industries’ Annual General Meeting today.


Thank you to everyone at Reliance Industries for all you do for India — from investing in infrastructure and technology to creating jobs and expanding opportunity to supporting communities in need, especially in this difficult moment for the country.


It’s been devastating to see the country hit so hard by COVID-19. Yet it’s heartening to see how Reliance has stepped up to contribute to the national response and get support to the communities that need it most. On behalf of all of us at Google: We hope you are taking care and we are wishing for better days ahead.


For Google, the past year has brought renewed purpose and greater urgency to our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. At a time when so many aspects of our lives and work are moving online, it’s even more important to make technology accessible and helpful for everyone. 


This goal is at the heart of our partnership with Reliance Jio. I was proud to help launch this partnership last year. It was the first and biggest equity investment from the ₹75,000 crore ($10 billion) Google for India Digitization Fund.


Our vision was to bring affordable access to information for Indians in their own language, to build new products and services for India’s unique needs, and to empower businesses with technology.


I’m excited that today, we can announce the next steps in this vision, starting with a new, affordable Jio smartphone, created with Google. Our teams have optimized a version of our Android OS especially for this device. It will offer language and translation features, a great camera, and support for the latest Android updates.


It is built for India and it will open up new possibilities for millions of new users who will experience the internet for the very first time. And we can’t wait to show you the device later this year.


I’m also proud to announce that we are taking our collaboration further with a new 5G partnership between Google Cloud and Jio.


It will help more than a billion Indians connect to a faster and better internet, support businesses in their digital transformation, and help Jio build new services in sectors like health, education and more — laying a foundation for the next phase of India’s digitization.  

As part of this collaboration, Reliance will also shift its core retail businesses to Google Cloud’s infrastructure. They will be able take advantage of Google’s AI and machine learning, e-commerce, and demand forecasting offerings. Harnessing the reliability and performance of Google Cloud will enable these businesses to scale up as needed to respond to customer demand. 

Empowering businesses as they embark on their digital transformation is a key part of our mission in India, and I’m excited for the innovations this partnership will help unleash. We are proud to play a part in India’s next wave of technological innovation. 


Helping to connect 1.3 billion Indians to the opportunities the internet creates is meaningful to all of us at Google — and certainly to me personally. I know that with greater access to smartphones and improved connectivity, there’s no limit to what India’s people can do. 


We look forward to getting technology into the hands of more people and to exploring what more we can achieve together in the years ahead. 

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Source: Android


Google I/O 2021: Being helpful in moments that matter

It’s great to be back hosting our I/O Developers Conference this year. Pulling up to our Mountain View campus this morning, I felt a sense of normalcy for the first time in a long while. Of course, it’s not the same without our developer community here in person. COVID-19 has deeply affected our entire global community over the past year and continues to take a toll. Places such as Brazil, and my home country of India, are now going through their most difficult moments of the pandemic yet. Our thoughts are with everyone who has been affected by COVID and we are all hoping for better days ahead.

The last year has put a lot into perspective. At Google, it’s also given renewed purpose to our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. We continue to approach that mission with a singular goal: building a more helpful Google, for everyone. That means being helpful to people in the moments that matter and giving everyone the tools to increase their knowledge, success, health and happiness. 

Helping in moments that matter

Sometimes it’s about helping in big moments, like keeping 150 million students and educators learning virtually over the last year with Google Classroom. Other times it’s about helping in little moments that add up to big changes for everyone. For example, we’re introducing safer routing in Maps. This AI-powered capability in Maps can identify road, weather and traffic conditions where you are likely to brake suddenly; our aim is to reduce up to 100 million events like this every year. 

Reimagining the future of work

One of the biggest ways we can help is by reimagining the future of work. Over the last year, we’ve seen work transform in unprecedented ways, as offices and coworkers have been replaced by kitchen countertops and pets. Many companies, including ours, will continue to offer flexibility even when it’s safe to be in the same office again. Collaboration tools have never been more critical, and today we announced a new smart canvas experience in Google Workspace that enables even richer collaboration. 

GIF of Smart Canvas integration with Google Meet

 Smart Canvas integration with Google Meet

Responsible next-generation AI

We’ve made remarkable advances over the past 22 years, thanks to our progress in some of the most challenging areas of AI, including translation, images and voice. These advances have powered improvements across Google products, making it possible to talk to someone in another language using Assistant’s interpreter mode, view cherished memories on Photos or use Google Lens to solve a tricky math problem. 

We’ve also used AI to improve the core Search experience for billions of people by taking a huge leap forward in a computer’s ability to process natural language. Yet, there are still moments when computers just don’t understand us. That’s because language is endlessly complex: We use it to tell stories, crack jokes and share ideas — weaving in concepts we’ve learned over the course of our lives. The richness and flexibility of language make it one of humanity’s greatest tools and one of computer science’s greatest challenges. 

Today I am excited to share our latest research in natural language understanding: LaMDA. LaMDA is a language model for dialogue applications. It’s open domain, which means it is designed to converse on any topic. For example, LaMDA understands quite a bit about the planet Pluto. So if a student wanted to discover more about space, they could ask about Pluto and the model would give sensible responses, making learning even more fun and engaging. If that student then wanted to switch over to a different topic — say, how to make a good paper airplane — LaMDA could continue the conversation without any retraining.

This is one of the ways we believe LaMDA can make information and computing radically more accessible and easier to use (and you can learn more about that here). 

We have been researching and developing language models for many years. We’re focused on ensuring LaMDA meets our incredibly high standards on fairness, accuracy, safety and privacy, and that it is developed consistently with our AI Principles. And we look forward to incorporating conversation features into products like Google Assistant, Search and Workspace, as well as exploring how to give capabilities to developers and enterprise customers.

LaMDA is a huge step forward in natural conversation, but it’s still only trained on text. When people communicate with each other they do it across images, text, audio and video. So we need to build multimodal models (MUM) to allow people to naturally ask questions across different types of information. With MUM you could one day plan a road trip by asking Google to “find a route with beautiful mountain views.” This is one example of how we’re making progress towards more natural and intuitive ways of interacting with Search.

Pushing the frontier of computing

Translation, image recognition and voice recognition laid the foundation for complex models like LaMDA and multimodal models. Our compute infrastructure is how we drive and sustain these advances, and TPUs, our custom-built machine learning processes, are a big part of that. Today we announced our next generation of TPUs: the TPU v4. These are powered by the v4 chip, which is more than twice as fast as the previous generation. One pod can deliver more than one exaflop, equivalent to the computing power of 10 million laptops combined. This is the fastest system we’ve ever deployed, and a historic milestone for us. Previously to get to an exaflop, you needed to build a custom supercomputer. And we'll soon have dozens of TPUv4 pods in our data centers, many of which will be operating at or near 90% carbon-free energy. They’ll be available to our Cloud customers later this year.

Images of a TPU v4 chip tray, and of TPU v4 pods at our Oklahoma data center

Left: TPU v4 chip tray; Right: TPU v4 pods at our Oklahoma data center 

It’s tremendously exciting to see this pace of innovation. As we look further into the future, there are types of problems that classical computing will not be able to solve in reasonable time. Quantum computing can help. Achieving our quantum milestone was a tremendous accomplishment, but we’re still at the beginning of a multiyear journey. We continue to work to get to our next big milestone in quantum computing: building an error-corrected quantum computer, which could help us increase battery efficiency, create more sustainable energy and improve drug discovery. To help us get there, we’ve opened a new state of the art Quantum AI campus with our first quantum data center and quantum processor chip fabrication facilities.

A photo of the interior of our new Quantum AI campus

Inside our new Quantum AI campus.

Safer with Google

At Google we know that our products can only be as helpful as they are safe. And advances in computer science and AI are how we continue to make them better. We keep more users safe by blocking malware, phishing attempts, spam messages and potential cyber attacks than anyone else in the world.

Our focus on data minimization pushes us to do more, with less data. Two years ago at I/O, I announced Auto-Delete, which encourages users to have their activity data automatically and continuously deleted. We’ve since made Auto-Delete the default for all new Google Accounts. Now, after 18 months we automatically delete your activity data, unless you tell us to do it sooner. It’s now active for over 2 billion accounts.

All of our products are guided by three important principles: With one of the world’s most advanced security infrastructures, our products are secure by default. We strictly uphold responsible data practices so every product we build is private by design. And we create easy to use privacy and security settings so you’re in control.

Long-term research: Project Starline

We were all grateful to have video conferencing over the last year to stay in touch with family and friends, and keep schools and businesses going. But there is no substitute for being together in the room with someone. 

Several years ago we kicked off a project called Project Starline to use technology to explore what’s possible. Using high-resolution cameras and custom-built depth sensors, it captures your shape and appearance from multiple perspectives, and then fuses them together to create an extremely detailed, real-time 3D model. The resulting data is many gigabits per second, so to send an image this size over existing networks, we developed novel compression and streaming algorithms that reduce the data by a factor of more than 100. We also developed a breakthrough light-field display that shows you the realistic representation of someone sitting in front of you. As sophisticated as the technology is, it vanishes, so you can focus on what’s most important. 

We’ve spent thousands of hours testing it at our own offices, and the results are promising. There’s also excitement from our lead enterprise partners, and we’re working with partners in health care and media to get early feedback. In pushing the boundaries of remote collaboration, we've made technical advances that will improve our entire suite of communications products. We look forward to sharing more in the months ahead.

A person in a booth talking to someone over Project Starline

A person having a conversation with someone over Project Starline.

Solving complex sustainability challenges

Another area of research is our work to drive forward sustainability. Sustainability has been a core value for us for more than 20 years. We were the first major company to become carbon neutral in 2007. We were the first to match our operations with 100% renewable energy in 2017, and we’ve been doing it ever since. Last year we eliminated our entire carbon legacy. 

Our next ambition is our biggest yet: operating on carbon free energy by the year 2030. This represents a significant step change from current approaches and is a moonshot on the same scale as quantum computing. It presents equally hard problems to solve, from sourcing carbon-free energy in every place we operate to ensuring it can run every hour of every day. 

Building on the first carbon-intelligent computing platform that we rolled out last year, we’ll soon be the first company to implement carbon-intelligent load shifting across both time and place within our data center network. By this time next year we’ll be shifting more than a third of non-production compute to times and places with greater availability of carbon-free energy. And we are working to apply our Cloud AI with novel drilling techniques and fiber optic sensing to deliver geothermal power in more places, starting in our Nevada data centers next year.

Investments like these are needed to get to 24/7 carbon-free energy, and it’s happening in Mountain View, California, too. We’re building our new campus to the highest sustainability standards. When completed, these buildings will feature a first-of-its-kind dragonscale solar skin, equipped with 90,000 silver solar panels and the capacity to generate nearly 7 megawatts. They will house the largest geothermal pile system in North America to help heat buildings in the winter and cool them in the summer. It’s been amazing to see it come to life.

Images with a rendering of the new Charleston East campus in Mountain View, California; and a model view with dragon scale solar skin.

Left: Rendering of the new Charleston East campus in Mountain View, California; Right: Model view with dragon scale solar skin.

A celebration of technology

I/O isn’t just a celebration of technology but of the people who use it, and build it — including the millions of developers around the world who joined us virtually today. Over the past year we’ve seen people use technology in profound ways: To keep themselves healthy and safe, to learn and grow, to connect and to help one another through really difficult times. It’s been inspiring to see and has made us more committed than ever to being helpful in the moments that matter. 

I look forward to seeing everyone at next year’s I/O — in person, I hope. Until then, be safe and well.

Google I/O 2021: Being helpful in moments that matter

It’s great to be back hosting our I/O Developers Conference this year. Pulling up to our Mountain View campus this morning, I felt a sense of normalcy for the first time in a long while. Of course, it’s not the same without our developer community here in person. COVID-19 has deeply affected our entire global community over the past year and continues to take a toll. Places such as Brazil, and my home country of India, are now going through their most difficult moments of the pandemic yet. Our thoughts are with everyone who has been affected by COVID and we are all hoping for better days ahead.

The last year has put a lot into perspective. At Google, it’s also given renewed purpose to our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. We continue to approach that mission with a singular goal: building a more helpful Google, for everyone. That means being helpful to people in the moments that matter and giving everyone the tools to increase their knowledge, success, health and happiness. 

Helping in moments that matter

Sometimes it’s about helping in big moments, like keeping 150 million students and educators learning virtually over the last year with Google Classroom. Other times it’s about helping in little moments that add up to big changes for everyone. For example, we’re introducing safer routing in Maps. This AI-powered capability in Maps can identify road, weather and traffic conditions where you are likely to brake suddenly; our aim is to reduce up to 100 million events like this every year. 

Reimagining the future of work

One of the biggest ways we can help is by reimagining the future of work. Over the last year, we’ve seen work transform in unprecedented ways, as offices and coworkers have been replaced by kitchen countertops and pets. Many companies, including ours, will continue to offer flexibility even when it’s safe to be in the same office again. Collaboration tools have never been more critical, and today we announced a new smart canvas experience in Google Workspace that enables even richer collaboration. 

GIF of Smart Canvas integration with Google Meet

 Smart Canvas integration with Google Meet

Responsible next-generation AI

We’ve made remarkable advances over the past 22 years, thanks to our progress in some of the most challenging areas of AI, including translation, images and voice. These advances have powered improvements across Google products, making it possible to talk to someone in another language using Assistant’s interpreter mode, view cherished memories on Photos or use Google Lens to solve a tricky math problem. 

We’ve also used AI to improve the core Search experience for billions of people by taking a huge leap forward in a computer’s ability to process natural language. Yet, there are still moments when computers just don’t understand us. That’s because language is endlessly complex: We use it to tell stories, crack jokes and share ideas — weaving in concepts we’ve learned over the course of our lives. The richness and flexibility of language make it one of humanity’s greatest tools and one of computer science’s greatest challenges. 

Today I am excited to share our latest research in natural language understanding: LaMDA. LaMDA is a language model for dialogue applications. It’s open domain, which means it is designed to converse on any topic. For example, LaMDA understands quite a bit about the planet Pluto. So if a student wanted to discover more about space, they could ask about Pluto and the model would give sensible responses, making learning even more fun and engaging. If that student then wanted to switch over to a different topic — say, how to make a good paper airplane — LaMDA could continue the conversation without any retraining.

This is one of the ways we believe LaMDA can make information and computing radically more accessible and easier to use (and you can learn more about that here). 

We have been researching and developing language models for many years. We’re focused on ensuring LaMDA meets our incredibly high standards on fairness, accuracy, safety and privacy, and that it is developed consistently with our AI Principles. And we look forward to incorporating conversation features into products like Google Assistant, Search and Workspace, as well as exploring how to give capabilities to developers and enterprise customers.

LaMDA is a huge step forward in natural conversation, but it’s still only trained on text. When people communicate with each other they do it across images, text, audio and video. So we need to build multimodal models (MUM) to allow people to naturally ask questions across different types of information. With MUM you could one day plan a road trip by asking Google to “find a route with beautiful mountain views.” This is one example of how we’re making progress towards more natural and intuitive ways of interacting with Search.

Pushing the frontier of computing

Translation, image recognition and voice recognition laid the foundation for complex models like LaMDA and multimodal models. Our compute infrastructure is how we drive and sustain these advances, and TPUs, our custom-built machine learning processes, are a big part of that. Today we announced our next generation of TPUs: the TPU v4. These are powered by the v4 chip, which is more than twice as fast as the previous generation. One pod can deliver more than one exaflop, equivalent to the computing power of 10 million laptops combined. This is the fastest system we’ve ever deployed, and a historic milestone for us. Previously to get to an exaflop, you needed to build a custom supercomputer. And we'll soon have dozens of TPUv4 pods in our data centers, many of which will be operating at or near 90% carbon-free energy. They’ll be available to our Cloud customers later this year.

Images of a TPU v4 chip tray, and of TPU v4 pods at our Oklahoma data center

Left: TPU v4 chip tray; Right: TPU v4 pods at our Oklahoma data center 

It’s tremendously exciting to see this pace of innovation. As we look further into the future, there are types of problems that classical computing will not be able to solve in reasonable time. Quantum computing can help. Achieving our quantum milestone was a tremendous accomplishment, but we’re still at the beginning of a multiyear journey. We continue to work to get to our next big milestone in quantum computing: building an error-corrected quantum computer, which could help us increase battery efficiency, create more sustainable energy and improve drug discovery. To help us get there, we’ve opened a new state of the art Quantum AI campus with our first quantum data center and quantum processor chip fabrication facilities.

A photo of the interior of our new Quantum AI campus

Inside our new Quantum AI campus.

Safer with Google

At Google we know that our products can only be as helpful as they are safe. And advances in computer science and AI are how we continue to make them better. We keep more users safe by blocking malware, phishing attempts, spam messages and potential cyber attacks than anyone else in the world.

Our focus on data minimization pushes us to do more, with less data. Two years ago at I/O, I announced Auto-Delete, which encourages users to have their activity data automatically and continuously deleted. We’ve since made Auto-Delete the default for all new Google Accounts. Now, after 18 months we automatically delete your activity data, unless you tell us to do it sooner. It’s now active for over 2 billion accounts.

All of our products are guided by three important principles: With one of the world’s most advanced security infrastructures, our products are secure by default. We strictly uphold responsible data practices so every product we build is private by design. And we create easy to use privacy and security settings so you’re in control.

Long-term research: Project Starline

We were all grateful to have video conferencing over the last year to stay in touch with family and friends, and keep schools and businesses going. But there is no substitute for being together in the room with someone. 

Several years ago we kicked off a project called Project Starline to use technology to explore what’s possible. Using high-resolution cameras and custom-built depth sensors, it captures your shape and appearance from multiple perspectives, and then fuses them together to create an extremely detailed, real-time 3D model. The resulting data is many gigabits per second, so to send an image this size over existing networks, we developed novel compression and streaming algorithms that reduce the data by a factor of more than 100. We also developed a breakthrough light-field display that shows you the realistic representation of someone sitting in front of you. As sophisticated as the technology is, it vanishes, so you can focus on what’s most important. 

We’ve spent thousands of hours testing it at our own offices, and the results are promising. There’s also excitement from our lead enterprise partners, and we’re working with partners in health care and media to get early feedback. In pushing the boundaries of remote collaboration, we've made technical advances that will improve our entire suite of communications products. We look forward to sharing more in the months ahead.

A person in a booth talking to someone over Project Starline

A person having a conversation with someone over Project Starline.

Solving complex sustainability challenges

Another area of research is our work to drive forward sustainability. Sustainability has been a core value for us for more than 20 years. We were the first major company to become carbon neutral in 2007. We were the first to match our operations with 100% renewable energy in 2017, and we’ve been doing it ever since. Last year we eliminated our entire carbon legacy. 

Our next ambition is our biggest yet: operating on carbon free energy by the year 2030. This represents a significant step change from current approaches and is a moonshot on the same scale as quantum computing. It presents equally hard problems to solve, from sourcing carbon-free energy in every place we operate to ensuring it can run every hour of every day. 

Building on the first carbon-intelligent computing platform that we rolled out last year, we’ll soon be the first company to implement carbon-intelligent load shifting across both time and place within our data center network. By this time next year we’ll be shifting more than a third of non-production compute to times and places with greater availability of carbon-free energy. And we are working to apply our Cloud AI with novel drilling techniques and fiber optic sensing to deliver geothermal power in more places, starting in our Nevada data centers next year.

Investments like these are needed to get to 24/7 carbon-free energy, and it’s happening in Mountain View, California, too. We’re building our new campus to the highest sustainability standards. When completed, these buildings will feature a first-of-its-kind dragonscale solar skin, equipped with 90,000 silver solar panels and the capacity to generate nearly 7 megawatts. They will house the largest geothermal pile system in North America to help heat buildings in the winter and cool them in the summer. It’s been amazing to see it come to life.

Images with a rendering of the new Charleston East campus in Mountain View, California; and a model view with dragon scale solar skin.

Left: Rendering of the new Charleston East campus in Mountain View, California; Right: Model view with dragon scale solar skin.

A celebration of technology

I/O isn’t just a celebration of technology but of the people who use it, and build it — including the millions of developers around the world who joined us virtually today. Over the past year we’ve seen people use technology in profound ways: To keep themselves healthy and safe, to learn and grow, to connect and to help one another through really difficult times. It’s been inspiring to see and has made us more committed than ever to being helpful in the moments that matter. 

I look forward to seeing everyone at next year’s I/O — in person, I hope. Until then, be safe and well.

A hybrid approach to work

Sundar sent the following email to Google employees earlier today. 

Hi Googlers,

We’ve spent the last year focused on supporting employees during the pandemic. I hope the extra benefits such as Carer’s Leave, the work-from-home allowance, the extra reset days, and the ability to work from wherever you need have been helpful in getting through this tough time.

And we’re not through it yet. It’s heartbreaking to see COVID surging in places like  India, Brazil, and many others around the world. If you live in one of these places, please focus on taking care of yourselves and your loved ones right now. We are here to support however we can. 

In other areas, conditions are less dire and people are beginning to open up their lives and think about returning to the office. In fact, in places where we’ve been able to reopen Google offices in a voluntary capacity, we’ve seen nearly 60% of Googlers choosing to come back to the office. 

For more than 20 years, our employees have been coming to the office to solve interesting problems — in a cafe, around a whiteboard, or during a pickup game of beach volleyball or cricket. Our campuses have been at the heart of our Google community and the majority of our employees still want to be on campus some of the time. Yet many of us would also enjoy the flexibility of working from home a couple days of week, spending time in another city for part of the year, or even moving there permanently. Google’s future workplace will have room for all of these possibilities. 

Over the last year, a team within REWS has been reimagining a hybrid workplace to help us collaborate effectively across many work environments. They’re testing new multi-purpose offices and private workspaces, and working with teams to develop advanced video technology that creates greater equity between employees in the office and those joining virtually. All of these efforts will help us work with greater flexibility and choice once we’re able to return to our offices globally. 


  • A workspace set up under a large canvas tent, with many tables and chairs, as well as plants and other decorations

    One of the spaces being tested by Google's Real Estate and Workplace Services team is "Camp Charleston," an outdoor space for holding larger team gatherings.

  • A "Team Pod" with a movable whiteboard wall, 4 desks on rollers and other reconfigurable furnishings, with 2 people sitting at desks and 1 person standing at a Jamboard, with another person on the videoconference

    "Team Pods" spaces can be reconfigured in multiple ways to support focused work and collaboration.

  • A "Campfire" space: A circular seating area with 2 people sitting in person, and 3 more on individual videoconference screens.

    "Campfire" is another experiment being tested to help ensure equal participation among those in person and remote.


That flexibility will come in a few different forms — and your product areas and functions will share more details on all of these changes by mid-June. Here are the key principles: 


A more flexible work week: 

  • We’ll move to a hybrid work week where most Googlers spend approximately three days in the office and two days wherever they work best. Since in-office time will be focused on collaboration, your product areas and functions will help decide which days teams will come together in the office. There will also be roles that may need to be on site more than three days a week due to the nature of the work. 

More choice around where you work: 

  • More locations globally: One of Google's biggest advantages is our global footprint. We are investing in many great communities globally — which creates more opportunity for employees to move around throughout their careers. By mid-June your PAs and functions will come back with a process by which you can apply to move to another office. In granting approvals, they’ll take into account whether business goals can be met in the new location and whether your team has the right infrastructure in the site to support your work. 

  • Remote work: We’ll also offer opportunities for you to apply for completely remote work (away from your team or office) based on your role and team needs. Before the pandemic, we had thousands of people working in locations separate from their core teams. I fully expect those numbers to increase in the coming months as we develop more remote roles, including fully all-remote sub teams. You’ll be able to apply for remote work within your product area or function. As with location transfers, your leads will evaluate whether remote work can support the goals of the team and business. Whether you choose to transfer to a different office or opt for completely remote work, your compensation will be adjusted according to your new location. 

  • Taken together these changes will result in a workforce where around 60% of Googlers are coming together in the office a few days a week, another 20% are working in new office locations, and 20% are working from home. 

More flexibility for your life: 

  • Work-from-anywhere weeks: Going forward, Googlers will be able to temporarily work from a location other than their main office for up to 4 weeks per year (with manager approval). The goal here is to give everyone more flexibility around summer and holiday travel. 

  • Focus time: Product areas and functions will also offer focus hours so we limit internal meetings during times when people need to be heads down on projects.

  • Reset days: We’ll continue offering extra “reset” days to help employees recharge during the pandemic in 2021. Our next global day off will be on Friday, May 28 (or the following work day if you’re already not working on the 28th). Please enjoy it!

GIF showing the text: More flexibility for your work week, More choice around where you work, More flexibility for your life

I know this past year hasn’t been easy for anyone and many Googlers are still suffering as the pandemic wears on. We will get through it — together — as a Google community. 

I am profoundly optimistic that once we do, we will be able to come back together in our offices to see all the people we have missed. And we’ll be able to work together in entirely new ways that improve both our work and our lives. 

The future of work is flexibility. The changes above are a starting point to help us do our very best work and have fun doing it. 

 Look forward to continuing the conversation with all of you. 

-Sundar

A hybrid approach to work

Sundar sent the following email to Google employees earlier today. 

Hi Googlers,

We’ve spent the last year focused on supporting employees during the pandemic. I hope the extra benefits such as Carer’s Leave, the work-from-home allowance, the extra reset days, and the ability to work from wherever you need have been helpful in getting through this tough time.

And we’re not through it yet. It’s heartbreaking to see COVID surging in places like  India, Brazil, and many others around the world. If you live in one of these places, please focus on taking care of yourselves and your loved ones right now. We are here to support however we can. 

In other areas, conditions are less dire and people are beginning to open up their lives and think about returning to the office. In fact, in places where we’ve been able to reopen Google offices in a voluntary capacity, we’ve seen nearly 60% of Googlers choosing to come back to the office. 

For more than 20 years, our employees have been coming to the office to solve interesting problems — in a cafe, around a whiteboard, or during a pickup game of beach volleyball or cricket. Our campuses have been at the heart of our Google community and the majority of our employees still want to be on campus some of the time. Yet many of us would also enjoy the flexibility of working from home a couple days of week, spending time in another city for part of the year, or even moving there permanently. Google’s future workplace will have room for all of these possibilities. 

Over the last year, a team within REWS has been reimagining a hybrid workplace to help us collaborate effectively across many work environments. They’re testing new multi-purpose offices and private workspaces, and working with teams to develop advanced video technology that creates greater equity between employees in the office and those joining virtually. All of these efforts will help us work with greater flexibility and choice once we’re able to return to our offices globally. 


  • A workspace set up under a large canvas tent, with many tables and chairs, as well as plants and other decorations

    One of the spaces being tested by Google's Real Estate and Workplace Services team is "Camp Charleston," an outdoor space for holding larger team gatherings.

  • A "Team Pod" with a movable whiteboard wall, 4 desks on rollers and other reconfigurable furnishings, with 2 people sitting at desks and 1 person standing at a Jamboard, with another person on the videoconference

    "Team Pods" spaces can be reconfigured in multiple ways to support focused work and collaboration.

  • A "Campfire" space: A circular seating area with 2 people sitting in person, and 3 more on individual videoconference screens.

    "Campfire" is another experiment being tested to help ensure equal participation among those in person and remote.


That flexibility will come in a few different forms — and your product areas and functions will share more details on all of these changes by mid-June. Here are the key principles: 


A more flexible work week: 

  • We’ll move to a hybrid work week where most Googlers spend approximately three days in the office and two days wherever they work best. Since in-office time will be focused on collaboration, your product areas and functions will help decide which days teams will come together in the office. There will also be roles that may need to be on site more than three days a week due to the nature of the work. 

More choice around where you work: 

  • More locations globally: One of Google's biggest advantages is our global footprint. We are investing in many great communities globally — which creates more opportunity for employees to move around throughout their careers. By mid-June your PAs and functions will come back with a process by which you can apply to move to another office. In granting approvals, they’ll take into account whether business goals can be met in the new location and whether your team has the right infrastructure in the site to support your work. 

  • Remote work: We’ll also offer opportunities for you to apply for completely remote work (away from your team or office) based on your role and team needs. Before the pandemic, we had thousands of people working in locations separate from their core teams. I fully expect those numbers to increase in the coming months as we develop more remote roles, including fully all-remote sub teams. You’ll be able to apply for remote work within your product area or function. As with location transfers, your leads will evaluate whether remote work can support the goals of the team and business. Whether you choose to transfer to a different office or opt for completely remote work, your compensation will be adjusted according to your new location. 

  • Taken together these changes will result in a workforce where around 60% of Googlers are coming together in the office a few days a week, another 20% are working in new office locations, and 20% are working from home. 

More flexibility for your life: 

  • Work-from-anywhere weeks: Going forward, Googlers will be able to temporarily work from a location other than their main office for up to 4 weeks per year (with manager approval). The goal here is to give everyone more flexibility around summer and holiday travel. 

  • Focus time: Product areas and functions will also offer focus hours so we limit internal meetings during times when people need to be heads down on projects.

  • Reset days: We’ll continue offering extra “reset” days to help employees recharge during the pandemic in 2021. Our next global day off will be on Friday, May 28 (or the following work day if you’re already not working on the 28th). Please enjoy it!

GIF showing the text: More flexibility for your work week, More choice around where you work, More flexibility for your life

I know this past year hasn’t been easy for anyone and many Googlers are still suffering as the pandemic wears on. We will get through it — together — as a Google community. 

I am profoundly optimistic that once we do, we will be able to come back together in our offices to see all the people we have missed. And we’ll be able to work together in entirely new ways that improve both our work and our lives. 

The future of work is flexibility. The changes above are a starting point to help us do our very best work and have fun doing it. 

 Look forward to continuing the conversation with all of you. 

-Sundar

New progress toward our 24/7 carbon-free energy goal

Like so many, I’ve been spending more time outdoors this year, whether it’s taking walks with my dog or hiking with my family. This extra time in nature has given me a deeper appreciation for the work being done to preserve our planet for future generations. At the same time, wildfires and other climate disasters around the world remind us of how urgent that work really is.

That’s why, with Earth Day this week, I’m so excited about the progress we’re making at Google towards our goal to operate entirely on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030. This commitment goes beyond being carbon neutral (which we’ve been since 2007) and matching our operations with 100% renewable energy, which we’ve now done over four consecutive years. (See below for an explainer on why carbon-free energy is our most ambitious sustainability goal yet.)

Chart showing the difference between carbon neutrality (offsets emissions), 100% renewable (reduces emissions), and 24/7 carbon free goals (eliminates emissions).

Within a decade we aim for every Google data center, cloud region, and office campus to run on clean electricity every hour of every day. And today I’m proud to announce that five of our data center sites — in Denmark, Finland, Iowa, Oklahoma and Oregon — are now operating near or at 90% carbon-free energy. 

Progress on round-the-clock clean energy

We’re seeing an increase in carbon-free energy across many of our sites due in large part to new renewable energy projects. To date, we have committed approximately $4 billion to purchase clean energy from more than 50 wind and solar projects globally through 2034. Last year, many of those projects came online, including hundreds of new wind turbines and hundreds of thousands of solar panels, which are helping to improve carbon-free energy performance at several Google data centers.   


For example, a new offshore wind farm is helping to supply electricity to our Belgium data center, and new solar projects helped pave the way for a nearly 17 percentage-point increase in carbon-free performance at our data center in the state of Georgia. Beyond renewable energy procurement, we are making good progress on 24/7 carbon-free energy in other ways, including shifting data center backup generation to batteries, advancing time-based clean energy tracking, and enabling Cloud customers to select the lowest carbon regions.

Helping everyone make more sustainable choices

In September we also committed to finding more ways our products can help 1 billion people make sustainable choices by 2022. Soon, Google Maps will default to the route with the lowest carbon footprint and let you compare the relative carbon impact between routes. Nest thermostats are helping U.S. customers save billions kWh of energy. And with nearly four decades of planetary imagery, Timelapse in Google Earth, released last week, can help everyone better understand climate change.
GIF showing Timelapse in Google Earth of the Columbia Glacier

Our carbon-free goal is as ambitious as other moonshots like building a quantum computer or developing a self-driving car. I’ve never been more optimistic about our collective ability — as governments, companies and individuals — to come together and chart a more sustainable path forward for our planet. We’ll continue to lead by example in our operations, support our partners, and build helpful products to build a carbon-free future for all.