Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai in an interview with The Circuit said that artificial intelligence has been a key focus for the tech giant since 2016 despite missing the big chatbot moment, Pichai seemed unperturbed.
The CEO 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”.
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Pichai admitted that errors pertaining 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”.
Pichai revealed that the feature will be re-released in a few weeks.
Pichai is set to share a vision for the company’s future at Google I/O–the company’s annual developers conference next week.
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Further Pichai confronted a question on his leadership style. Amid all the strategic challenges Alphabet faces, several former and current employees have slammed Pichai 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”.
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Backing the significance of building consensus, the Alphabet CEO said, “…it allows you to have maximum impact behind those decisions”.
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Last month, Google also fired dozens of engineers who protested the company’s cloud contract with the Israeli government, in what Pichai describes as an unacceptable disruption of 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.”
(With Bloomberg inputs)
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Published: 09 May 2024, 10:21 AM IST
