Google got a head start in the artificial intelligence race, and at the DealBook Summit on Dec. 4, its chief executive, Sundar Pichai, snapped back at suggestions that it should be more competitive considering its vast resources.
Whereas A.I. startups rely on tech giants for processing power, Google uses its own. The company’s products, like YouTube and Gmail, give it access to mountains of data, and its A.I. researchers have made huge breakthroughs, with two of them winning a Nobel Prize this year. That gives Google an advantage in all three of what Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, earlier in the day called “key inputs” to A.I. progress: compute, data and algorithms.
Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, has said that Google should have been the “default winner” in A.I. At the DealBook Summit, Pichai responded, “I would love to do a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft’s own models and our models any day, any time.” Microsoft largely depends on OpenAI for its A.I. models.
Pichai also defended his company’s competitiveness. He said that although he thought A.I. progress would slow in the next year (speaking earlier, Altman had a different take), Google’s search engine “will continue to change profoundly in ’25.”
He said he expected search to become more, not less, valuable as the web is flooded with content generated by A.I.
Pichai also touched on the company’s antitrust lawsuits, the second Trump administration and how artificial intelligence is affecting the way he hires. Here are five highlights from the conversation.
On Google’s antitrust cases
Google lost an antitrust case in August over its search dominance, and the company now faces the possibility that a federal judge will force it to divest from its Chrome web browser. It is also awaiting a decision in an antitrust case over its ad tech business. Pichai defended the company and said he had “deep faith in our judicial system.” He also said that Google might eventually spin off units for other reasons:
There are companies in our other bets, which they are set up with boards; we have outside investors. Just — we take a long-term view, and you know, do I expect in a 10-year time frame some of those to be independent public companies? The answer is yes.
He said that regardless of which businesses would ultimately spin off from Google’s parent company, Alphabet, “I’m staying with the mothership.”
On Trump
President-elect Donald Trump recently nominated Andrew Ferguson to replace Lina Khan as F.T.C. chair. While Ferguson is likely to be more lenient on mergers than his predecessors were, he told members of Trump’s transition team that he would continue to scrutinize Big Tech companies. At the summit, which was held before Ferguson was announced as Trump’s pick, Pichai expressed optimism about the Trump administration:
Look, I think there’s a real opportunity in this moment. One of the constraints for A.I. could be the infrastructure we have in this country, including energy. The rate at which we can build things. I think there are real areas where I think he’s thinking about and committed to making a difference. So hopefully we can make progress there.
Before and after the election, technology executives courted favor with Trump, and Amazon, Meta and Altman of OpenAI each plan to donate $1 million to the president-elect’s inaugural fund. Other executives speaking at the summit expressed views similar to that of Pichai, including Jeff Bezos, who said, “I’m very hopeful.”
On A.I. and hiring
On a recent call with analysts, Pichai said that more than a quarter of Google’s new code was now generated by A.I. but reviewed and accepted by engineers. Pichai said the technology would make engineers more productive than ever, and that more people will become programmers, not fewer:
Just like blogging made the world of publishing, not everyone needs to be as good as you to get online and write something. And, you know, I feel the same with programming. I think 10 years from now, it will be accessible to millions more people.
On whether Google will need more or fewer programmers in the future, he said:
All of us as companies are thinking about how to be more productive. You have to do that. And A.I. is one of the most important ways we are thinking about how to make the company more efficient and productive across everything. So factored into our growth plans is an assumption that our software engineers will be more productive than ever before. So that may, on the margin, have an impact, but it’s also being able to do more things. So it’s not that you’re looking to hire less people, but what can you accomplish with those people?
On A.I. safety and regulation
Geoffrey Hinton, a former Google engineer who won a Nobel Prize this year for his work in artificial intelligence, left the company last year and warned of the technology’s dangers. Regulators around the world have taken vastly different approaches to regulating the technology, and the U.S. federal government has been slow to put any guardrails around A.I., even as executives like Altman have suggested that such regulation is necessary. Pichai said he was “definitely on the optimistic side” about the potential impact of A.I. and argued that existing regulation already covered a lot of the uses for artificial intelligence. For example, he said:
It’s not like you can bring a treatment in without going through all the regulatory approvals. So just because you’re using A.I. doesn’t change all of that, right? So you really want to be careful about what additional regulation, if anything, you need at all. You know, you have to get your drugs approved. There’s the established process to do that.
On employee activism
A decade ago, Google was considered a hotbed of employee activism, but executives have made moves to discourage employees from expressing their political views in the office. This year, the company fired 28 workers after they participated in sit-ins at work to protest its cloud computing contract with the Israeli government, and Pichai wrote in a memo to employees that Google was not a place “fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.” Pichai said of the company’s apparent shift:
People come with a variety of personal opinions of workplaces, and where you can reconcile all those differences is that you’re there because you believe in the mission. And the best way we can impact the world is through the products and services we build. And so getting our employees to be more mission-first and mission-focused. The company is not a personal platform, right? And I think for me, it’s been a change for a while.
On whether the power dynamic in companies has swung from employees back to employers, Pichai said:
I don’t see it as a power dynamic, necessarily. I actually think it’s resonating with a lot of employees, too.
On using copyrighted material to train A.I.
The business model around the enormous amounts of data used to create A.I. models is in flux. News sites like The New York Times are suing OpenAI and Microsoft for using articles without authorization, while other sites like The Associated Press have signed deals to license their data. Google pays to license data from Reddit, for example, but the Reddit users who created the data aren’t paid. Pichai said:
I think there’ll be creators who will create for A.I. models, or something like that, and get paid for it. I definitely think that’s part of the future.
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