Sundar Pichai spurns criticism, says Google is AI native & is key to ongoing transformation

Pichai, who was speaking on the podcast Decoder by Nilay Patel for The Verge, said that AI is the most profound technology that humanity has been working on. The 50-year-old said that he views the AI wave as one of those deeper shifts.

A deeper shift

“…I view it as one of those deeper shifts that way. It’s tough to find the right words, but I view it as… Even as an industry, like a very traditional industry, you wouldn’t say the internet affected healthcare a lot. Did it affect healthcare? I’m not fully sure. But with AI, I’m like, it’s going to affect healthcare a lot over time. Along those terms, I think there’s a deeper meaning to the word “platform shift” here, as well,” he was heard saying.

When asked about what was his favourite generative AI feature on Google products, Pichai told the host that it was the new Search Generative Experience that Google has been working on bringing to Google Labs. Pichai said that it has been Google’s most used product and the chance to make it better through evolution was among the most exciting product challenges. He added that his team took the challenge head-on and that he was very excited about it.

On risks to Google

When asked if he foresaw a risk for Google in the wake of the ‘platform shift’, Pichai said that the company was in its seventh year as an AI-first organisation. He said that Google is an AI native adding that all the recent developments were because teams at Google intuitively understood what it is to use AI products. The Google CEO said that the company is deeply invested in AI and that it not only has clarity in building its own products but also about what it is offering to the rest of the world.

“All these shifts are disruptive, but I look at the scale and size of the opportunity ahead with AI, and I feel like we have worked. We’ve invested so deeply in AI for a while, and we have clarity of not just building AI in our products, clearly providing it to the rest of the world. And we have planned for that from the very beginning. So it makes me excited about this moment,” Pichai was heard saying.

Criticism and hallucinations

When asked about the criticism of Google and that the platform shift was actually kicked off by OpenAI and Microsoft, Pichai argued that most of the shift was driven by the work Google did on transformers. Talking about the delay, Pichai said that “it was important given our products are used by so many people, and in important moments, I thought it was important to get it right,” adding that Google wasn’t even around when the shift to the Internet was happening.

Upon being asked to share his views on hallucination and errors, Pichai said that context was important. He demonstrated this by saying that when a user was searching for medicine, it was not okay to hallucinate. Whereas when one simply wants to create a song or poem, it is okay if one gets wrong responses occasionally. The Google boss said that the company was making progress on the hallucinations problem in the context of search and that it takes time.

“…we’ve made progress on the hallucination problem in the context of Search by grounding it, corroborating what we do there with our ranking work. It just takes time,” he said.