Google CEO Sundar Pichai Lays Out Future AI Roadmap

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, during a recent interview with The Circuit, said that AI has been the company’s biggest focus since 2016 despite missing the AI chatbot train. But it seems Pichai is unfazed by the challenges that the future holds in the field of artificial intelligence.

Sundar Pichai told The Circuit, "We weren’t the first company to search. We weren’t the first company to do email. We weren’t the first company to build a browser...So I view this AI as we are in the earliest possible stages".

The CEO admitted that hiccups related to Gemini’s image generation feature and said, "From the ground up we are retraining these models...as soon as it’s ready, we will get it out to people". He also noted that the feature will be relaunched in the coming weeks. Pichai will soon share a vision for Google’s future at I/O, the company’s annual developers conference.

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Pichai Acknowledges Recent Firings At Google

Sundar Pichai also confronted questions regarding his leadership approach. Amid all the strategic challenges the parent company faces, many ex-Google employees criticized the CEO for  being "too cautious and consensus-driven."

Pichai responded saying, "I think the larger the company is, you are making fewer consequential decisions, but they need to be clear and you have to point the whole company to that". He added, "...it allows you to have maximum impact behind those decisions".

Recently, Google laid off dozens of engineers who protested Google Cloud's contract with the Israeli government, in what Pichai called an unacceptable disruption for the company’s daily business. “It has nothing to do with the matter or the topic they’re discussing. It’s about the conduct of how they went about it," he says. “I view, particularly in this moment with AI, the opportunity we have ahead of us is immense, but it needs a real focus on our mission."

Also Read: Microsoft Developing New AI Model To Rival Google, OpenAI

Google Expands Hiring In India And Mexico

Recently, Google sacked around 200 employees from its “core team” and moved some of the vacancies to cut costs as part of the company’s restructuring process. Around 50 jobs were cut from the engineering team based in California.

The company is now expected to hire replacement workers for positions in India and Mexico, as reported by CNBC citing internal documents.

The “core” team at the company is responsible for developing the "technical foundation behind the company's flagship products" along with user safety online and the company’s global IT infrastructure, which was targeted during the layoff. The decision was made just a day ahead of Google’s first-quarter earnings report.