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JH Jordi Hays Jordi Hays Co-founder and host of TBPN, a daily technology talk show covering startup news, funding rounds and the businesses behind Silicon Valley.

“They're effectively saying that all of our products are AI. So if you tell us not to use AI, then you can't use any of our products. It sounds much more aggressive to say you can no longer Google search, but I think their point is that AI is everywhere across every product surface area, and so it's unavoidable.”

TBPN · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“They're effectively saying that all of our products are AI. So if you tell us not to use AI, then you can't use any of our products. It sounds much more aggressive to say you can no longer Google search, but I think their point is that AI is everywhere across every product surface area, and so it's unavoidable.” — Jordi Hays, TBPN

Context

Coogan raised a report that Google would turn off search for schools that reject its AI defaults. Hays explains Google's position as AI being built into every product.

Transcript

TBPN Around 06:07 into the episode
Jordi Hays

And, but, but again, it's like, as long as they can stay competitive around the cloud and chip business, you know, there's a lot of upside.

John Coogan

What is going on with this New York Times headline? Google will turn off search for schools that reject AI. Curran is sort of correcting the record here, but it sounds really aggressive. It's like the carrot of the stick.

Jordi Hays

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're effectively saying, like, if you, we are every, all of our products are AI. So if you tell us not to use AI, then you can't use any of our products, right? But it sounds much more aggressive to be like, you can no longer Google search. But I think their point is that AI is everywhere across every product surface area. And so it's unavoidable. So

John Coogan

Andrew Curran says this article is getting posted everywhere this morning. I can see why. Very, very controversial. But this decision is being incorrectly framed as punitive. There's no such thing as search without Gemini. Even if you don't turn AI mode on, you're still talking to Gemini in the…

Jordi Hays

I think so.

John Coogan

Google is not going to save you at this point. If you're trying to learn, you got to hit the books. I don't think you're going to be doing that. What's going on with Grockbot? I don't know. The Grockbot thing was very weird. So Elon Caps in on November 1st, which was what, Sunday morning, I guess…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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