‘AI can provide most people with equal opportunities’: Google’s Sundar Pichai

“I grew up in India. Part of what attracted me to the internet and to Google was the realisation that this was the first time the internet could reach everyone. As long as they [people] have access to computing and connectivity, you have the same knowledge at your fingertips as anywhere else in the world. I view AI as having the same potential,” he said.

Pichai’s comments come at a time when the impact of AI is up for debate, and both civil society and regulators are questioning Big Tech for prioritising the public interest over speeding up the development of AI tools, which requires the development of rules and the enforcement of legal guardrails.

At I/O, Google’s flagship developer conference this week, the search giant laid out a bold plan as to how it wants to implement artificial intelligence as the foundation of its most popular products like Gmail and Search. Pichai described this as “the Gemini era,” a new phase of AI development. The company made decisive changes to Core AI tools and rolled out a version of its ubiquitous search engine that includes responses written by artificial intelligence, in one of the major revamps to the gateway to the internet that made the web accessible decades ago. However, Google’s move to add AI to its search engine is seen as bad news for publishers and the rest of the wider web economy.

“As a company, we have been investing in AI for a long time. We are developing state-of-the-art models and working to deploy them to billions of people in a way that can make a difference in their lives. To me, that’s the North Star. That’s our mission,” he said.