“Classic” Google was an information retrieval company: you give a query, we quickly respond with ten suggestions of relevant pages, and it is your job to make sense of the suggestions. “Modern” Google, as Sundar has set out the vision, is based not just on suggestions of relevant information, but on informing and assisting. Informing, meaning that we give you the information you need, when you need it. For example, Google Now telling you it is time to leave for an appointment, or that you are now at the grocery store and previously you asked to be reminded to buy milk. And assisting means helping you to actually carry out actions—planning a trip, booking reservations; anything you can do on the internet, Google should be able to assist you in doing.

With information retrieval, anything over 80% recall and precision is pretty good—not every suggestion has to be perfect, since the user can ignore the bad suggestions. With assistance, there is a much higher barrier. You wouldn’t use a service that booked the wrong reservation 20% of the time, or even 2% of the time. So an assistant needs to be much more accurate, and thus more intelligent, more aware of the situation. That’s what we call “AI-first.”