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From traffic light timing to flood forecasting, Google’s research arm is bringing AI to a slew of real-world problems that might seem far afield from the company’s core search business.
Yossi Matias, who took over as head of Google Research this May, is hoping to tap into what he calls a new “golden age” of tech research to make progress across these varied projects. Matias said the time between research findings and their practical application—something he calls the “magic cycle”—is shrinking, which could open new doors in a host of different fields.
We spoke with Matias about how he chooses investment priorities, the future of LLM progress, and his goals for 2025.
This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Google’s research projects cover everything from flood and wildfire forecasting to weather systems and LLMs. How do you decide where you focus resources?
So you mentioned flooding—let me pick on that for a moment…I’ve been overseeing what we call Google Crisis Response, which is essentially how to respond to people turning to Google for information or trusting Google with information when something happens. We just had an earthquake in California, so immediately, people want to know what’s going on and what they should be doing. And as part of that, I was leading the development of what we call SOS Alerts, which provided actionable information to people—quite often within an hour or minutes of when something happens…We’ve had over 4 billion views of SOS Alerts since we launched it, anything from natural disasters to terror attacks to even Covid alerts.
One thing we discovered early on is that if our mission was making sure that any available information that can be helpful is given to people right away, there were certain things that we could not be helpful because nobody had information.
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