Michigan AI Laboratory

Over a Decade of Moonshots: From Search to AI Last Friday marked the end of my 13-year journey at Google, a journey that has transformed me as an engineer, leader, and individual, a journey that I am incredibly grateful for! From my beginnings as a fresh grad to impacting billions of lives through contributions to some of Google's most groundbreaking projects. Beginnings with Search Infrastructure Despite the immense challenges and Infra complexity, I was drawn to an ambitious new moonshot of revolutionizing personal content understanding to improve users’ personal journeys. One of my fond achievements was developing the foundation for private instant indexing, which dramatically reduced the indexing overhead and enabled real-time updates. Revolutionizing Search with Question Answering Next, I joined another early Search Moonshot in Question Answering, a groundbreaking effort to revolutionize search experiences beyond the traditional 10-blue links by fulfilling users' insatiable curiosity for knowledge with concise answers. We pushed the boundaries of QA to what seems like unimaginable frontiers (coverage and quality). I am particularly proud of the progress my team, collaborators, and I made on the Short Answers, Knowledge Augmentation, and overall Answer Freshness to identify trusted answers from an increasingly opinionated web and deliver fresh responses to users (a foundation that became especially critical later, during the Covid pandemic). New era with LLMs In 2019, I felt that we may have reached a performance plateau with our QA/AI strategies, and eyeing the larger Search-wide impact, I embarked on my own moonshot (named MUM) to harness the power of emerging LLM technology to address Search users' needs holistically. I recruited and led a team of believers from Search and Research to develop a groundbreaking internal LLMs enabling a significant uplift to Search experiences and quality, marking a new ML era in Search that was recognized with Google's prestigious 2023 Technical Impact Award. Building on MUM success, I joined the Gemini effort, leading internal Gemini x Search efforts and delivering state-of-the-art novel internal variants aligned with Search needs. A Heartfelt Thank You It truly takes a village and my success wouldn’t have been possible without an exceptional team and peers that joined me in this exciting and fruitful journey! Reminded by a note I once read, "You don’t create a culture. You define values, find like-minded people who live those values, and together a culture is born." I am incredibly proud of the culture we nurtured and humbled by the warm, heartfelt, and incredibly touching goodbyes. Thank you outstanding team, exceptional collaborators, beloved leaders, and Google! I will always cherish the memories and friendships I made and take great pride in this beautiful chapter in my career!