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DEBI CABRERA: We're here at Next '24 with Richard Seroter,
none other than our Chief Evangelist at Google Cloud.
Richard, thank you so much for being here with us.
RICHARD SEROTER: Thank you so much for inviting me.
DEBI CABRERA: Just to kick it off, we do Next every year.
What's your favorite part of coming to Next?
What really excites you about this?
RICHARD SEROTER: I mean, selfishly,
it's-- and I'm not just pandering.
It's seeing people like you and the team.
Like, we have a big team, and we're all over the world.
And this is that one rare chance we
get to all be in the same room at the same time
and hang out together.
So I love all the people coming here,
but they're second to the team.
DEBI CABRERA: You hear that, team?
We're number one in his heart.
So, like I said, the keynote was amazing.
You-- maybe I'm biased, but I feel like every year
they get better.
You and Chloe did an amazing job hosting.
RICHARD SEROTER: Thank you.
DEBI CABRERA: Really inspirational.
RICHARD SEROTER: Yeah.
DEBI CABRERA: Makes me want to be a better developer
and developer advocate.
RICHARD SEROTER: Me too.
DEBI CABRERA: So you kicked it off strong
with Gemini 1.5 Pro Vision.
And you showed how we can get insights from video, but also
from huge databases.
So can you share some of these amazing numbers
that you talked about?
RICHARD SEROTER: Yeah.
I mean, a huge context window we keep talking about,
all these tokens I can pass in, just
the idea of we could give it the 75-minute video we gave
of last year's keynote, and actually
get back details of who spoke when,
and when did we show a demo.
Like, it's not just reading a transcript.
It's actually understanding the video, which is amazing.
So I just love this idea that we'll
be able to pass in so much code-- our giant documents
or whatever it is, or one of those long emails
our boss sends us, it can process the actual whole thing.
I think it's pretty cool to be able to think
about not having to over-architect these really
complicated solutions.
Maybe it's just one Gemini call.
And, I don't know, we should be aiming for simplicity.
And I think I'm seeing more and more of that, which is great.
DEBI CABRERA: Yes.
I love how you talked about simplifying the complexity
of Gen AI, which is amazing.
And I know selfishly, also, that's
a great feature that I love to use when there's a huge code
base, and you just need a quick summary, right?
RICHARD SEROTER: Yeah, exactly.
Who can process all that stuff?
I just summarize-- give me the gist.
That's all we need.
DEBI CABRERA: Yeah.
Gemini is changing the way that developers deliver software.
And you mentioned a few key ways in which
that's happening-- better coding, better platforms,
and better ops.
Can you talk to me a little bit about each of those?
RICHARD SEROTER: Yeah.
The better coding is a good part of, a,
how do I just, again, build--
how do I complete my code, add better tasks, just
better quality?
Can I ship it faster?
Can I get better value from that?
So I think we saw a lot of that in the keynote
with cool frameworks like Next.js
and calling it the Gemini endpoints.
This isn't just Google tech.
I want everybody using all kinds of languages using this.
So that's the exciting part is we're not really
a homogeneous vibe here for developers.
Use your favorite IDE.
Use your favorite language.
I think that's great.
So you need the coding part.
But then there's a big platform piece.
Like, I need-- how am I going to serve up models?
What are the right models?
How do I do this retrieval augmented generation stuff?
Like, how do we do that really, really well?
We've seen-- we saw some great examples
in the keynote, all the breakouts of yeah,
let's just make platforms better.
Let's have them be smarter.
Let's have them be easier managed.
We saw demonstrations from the folks
on GKE side of make it easier to run GKE with AI.
Like, help us understand what's going on.
I love that.
And then yeah, the ops part.
Troubleshooting is still not easy.
And now we're just generating more data.
So if I can use AI to sift through piles of logs or figure
out troubleshooting-- you and I know
if the favorite site you go to is offline,
you just go to another one.
So I got to get people back online quick.
So it seems like having AI is making the dev better,
the platform better, the ops better.
And we're only getting started, which is great.
DEBI CABRERA: Yeah.
It's awesome.
And two of my favorite things that you mentioned too
is Gemini Code Assist which, again I use daily almost now.
RICHARD SEROTER: Yeah.
Me too.
DEBI CABRERA: And Gemini Cloud Assist, which is also--
RICHARD SEROTER: I'm excited about that.
I mean, that's-- it's one thing to do ops.
It's another to do ops that understand you.
Like in our example, we're saying, hey,
who broke the firewall, and it was me,
I don't like being blamed publicly.
But at least you have better context versus
just like generically, here's what you could look at.
So yeah, that personalization-- that's
the secret to this next stage of AI.
DEBI CABRERA: Nice.
Yeah, I totally agree.
And you learned your lesson, right?
You're not going to break the firewall again.
RICHARD SEROTER: No.
Yeah, not in front of my boss, no.
DEBI CABRERA: [LAUGHS] Wonderful.
OK.
So another really interesting thing that's super exciting
is Gemini in BigQuery and all of the amazing features
that come with that.
You can build apps and data agents with multimodal AI.
And I've actually tried this out as well.
So what's your favorite part of that?
Talk through us a little-- talk us through that a little bit.
RICHARD SEROTER: Yeah.
I think the most powerful part is it's all in one environment.
Like that BigQuery Studio environment
where I'm not only writing queries,
I'm getting it generating queries.
It's doing the multi-modal.
I can query against images or text.
I'm not bouncing between different things.
Even we showed continuous queries,
where you can keep running this.
And BigQuery will actually host your query
and just keep running it and checking it.
Like, that's super powerful stuff that--
back to the simplification.
A few years ago this was like 10 products.
And now we're sitting there going,
it's maybe one thing that just makes this easier.
So I just love how BigQuery is becoming the center of this
and making it easier to do really sophisticated things.
DEBI CABRERA: Yeah.
And I reiterate that it's helping devs deliver software
more simply, quicker, and honestly,
just in a more enjoyable way because of less context
switching.
Things are being done for you, automation.
RICHARD SEROTER: Completely.
DEBI CABRERA: It's so exciting.
RICHARD SEROTER: A lot less toil.
DEBI CABRERA: Exactly.
And, of course, something that's being talked about all the time
now is RAG.
It's not just a towel that you clean your floors with.
Retrieval Augmented Generation-- of course,
it helps optimize the output of our LLMs.
Can you give me a little deep dive into RAG, and how
are we using it with our LLMs?
RICHARD SEROTER: Yeah.
I mean, I think when you see there's, I think,
what, three ways people can make the output of a model better.
You can give it better prompts--
stuff more stuff in there and direct it.
You can do fine-tuning and actually take a model
and train it with your own data.
That's expensive and can have its own thing.
But instead, this Retrieval Augmented Generation says,
Can I use the base model, but then
dip into another data source to complement that input?
And so we're making it a little easier
to say, yeah, give me a data source,
and we'll chunk it all up and handle it for you.
And then when you make those queries,
you have more trust in the output
because it's actually looking up your data, complementing
that with what it's looking at.
So I think as people want to have trust in this,
this can't just be a play thing.
Like, you and I will be so frustrated
if everyone just uses Gen AI for fun
and not to actually get the production.
I kind of want to just use this in Dev.
I want to use this all the way.
So you have to trust it, though.
And so the tools we've been doing, the support now
across almost every Google Cloud database for vector search
and things like that--
super powerful.
We're not saying it's only one way to do it.
There's a few ways, but we're making it simpler.
DEBI CABRERA: And I love what you
said about increasing that trust because that's what this does--
make sure that you can trust the answers that you're
getting just a little bit more.
RICHARD SEROTER: Yeah.
DEBI CABRERA: I know that you love all your children equally,
right?
All of these announcements are amazing.
RICHARD SEROTER: Yeah.
DEBI CABRERA: Do you have a secret favorite?
Not so secret?
RICHARD SEROTER: I mean, from this week's things,
I am excited a lot about the Code Assist Cloud Assist piece.
I think there's a-- bringing AI to how we develop and operate
software-- there's so much room to make this better.
Like, you and I still-- and at least I
pretend to be a developer still.
Like, any assistance I can get where
it lets me focus on the fun parts of it,
and I don't have to do some of the other pieces--
I care about the other pieces.
But somebody smarter than me, in this case, a robot,
should be doing some of this for me or helping me troubleshoot.
So I think unveiling Cloud Assist,
showing how Code Assist is now getting smarter,
having-- be able-- more context.
it's going to be such a game changer right now.
I'm excited for what the next 10 years of software looks like.
DEBI CABRERA: Yes, I totally agree.
It really does make our lives easier as developers.
I've been using it.
And it's so funny because sometimes I'm doing something,
and we'll forget that we have this at our fingertips
now because it's new and exciting.
So we'll say, oh, did you try using Code Assist for that?
I'll say, oh, right.
Let me check that out.
RICHARD SEROTER: Well, that context switching--
I mean, when you and I, we go back.
And I have to go jump to search results.
I have to go jump to a weird blog post.
I got to do Stack Overflow.
Those are all great sources, but it gets me out of my flow.
And so we, I think, are obsessed with keeping people
in a flow state so you just do better work longer.
I'm for that.
DEBI CABRERA: Yeah, exactly.
And it feels more play instead of work, right?
RICHARD SEROTER: Yeah.
It should be fun.
DEBI CABRERA: Want to keep the fun.
RICHARD SEROTER: This is the best time to be doing software.
We should be having a blast with this.
DEBI CABRERA: Well, thank you so much for being here with us
today.
It's a pleasure, as always.
RICHARD SEROTER: You're welcome.
DEBI CABRERA: And your dev keynote was, of course,
recorded.
So make sure to check that out.
And keep watching because we're going
to have a lot more great interviews and information
about talks coming at you.
RICHARD SEROTER: I love it.
Thanks, Debi.
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