Google’s Sundar Pichai Lays Out His AI Roadmap
09.05.2024 - 02:35
/ tech.hindustantimes.com
/ Sundar Pichai
Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai says artificial intelligence has been a key focus of the Google parent since 2016, back when ChatGPT-maker OpenAI was in its infancy. After all, Google researchers invented the “T” in GPT (as in generative pre-trained transformer). It was a critical innovation that made conversational search using large language models possible.
Somehow though, Google missed the big chatbot moment and has been playing catchup ever since. But Pichai, who sat down for an exclusive interview with The Circuit with Emily Chang, doesn't seem worried. “We weren't the first company to do search. We weren't the first company to do email. We weren't the first company to build a browser,” he says. “So I view this AI as we are in the earliest possible stages.”
In other words, Pichai is playing the long game, and says Google—which dominates key real estate on the web—has plenty of time to win.
Google's effort to reclaim the AI microphone has nevertheless experienced more than a few hiccups. When the company unveiled its Gemini image generator in February, users quickly found weaknesses. Requests for depictions of historical scenes yielded awkward images of Asian Nazis and Black US founding fathers. The company's effort to ensure its AI systems didn't perpetuate human biases had apparently backfired.
“We got it wrong,” says Pichai, 51, who contends the incident was a case of good intentions gone awry. Google immediately shut down Gemini's image generation feature for people, with Pichai ordering a complete rebuild. “From the ground up we are retraining these models, just to make sure we are also making the product better,” he says. “As soon as it's ready, we will get it out to people.” He predicted the feature will be re-released in a few weeks.
Still, the future of search—and whether Google will continue to dominate that space—remains unclear. Next week, Pichai is to share his vision for the company's future at Google I/O, the company's annual developers conference. But in his interview with The Circuit, he gave us a preview.
Are we nearing the end of those “ten blue links,” like some pundits have predicted, as more conversational results from ChatGPT, Antrhopic's Claude and other chatbots become more mainstream? Pichai says the best form of search will involve some combination of narrative answers and links to other websites to allow further exploration.
“My son is celiac, so we did a quick question to see whether something is gluten free,” Pichai says. Often a search for one query “leads to more things and then you want to explore more.” Meeting a variety of a searcher's needs is what makes Google unique, he says.
Getting search right is essential to Google's future, since ads