Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai on the A.I. Moment: ‘You Will See Us Be Bold’

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/technology/google-pichai-ai.html

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Sundar Pichai has been trying to start an A.I. revolution for a very long time.

In 2016, shortly after being named Google’s chief executive, Mr. Pichai declared that Google was an “A.I.-first” company. He spent lavishly to assemble an all-star team of A.I. researchers, whose breakthroughs powered changes to products like Google Translate and Google Photos. He even predicted that A.I.’s impact would be bigger than “electricity or fire.”

So it had to sting when A.I.’s big moment finally arrived, and Google wasn’t involved.

Instead, OpenAI — a scrappy A.I. start-up backed by Microsoft — stole the spotlight in November by releasing ChatGPT, a poem-writing, code-generating, homework-finishing marvel. ChatGPT became an overnight sensation, attracting millions of users and kicking off a Silicon Valley frenzy. It made Google look sluggish and vulnerable for the first time in years. (It didn’t help when Microsoft relaunched its Bing search engine with OpenAI’s technology inside, instantly ending Bing’s decade-long run as a punchline.)

In an interview with The Times’s “Hard Fork” podcast on Thursday, his first extended interview since ChatGPT’s launch, Mr. Pichai said he was glad that A.I. was having a moment, even if Google wasn’t the driving force.

“It’s an exciting moment, regardless of whether we had done it,” Mr. Pichai said. “Obviously, you always wish you had done it.”

It’s been a wild few months at Google. In December, shortly after ChatGPT’s release, someone in management — Mr. Pichai swears it wasn’t him — declared a “code red,” instructing employees to shift time and resources toward A.I. projects. The company also established a fast-track review process to get A.I. projects out more quickly. And Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founders, who took a hands-off approach for years, rolled up their sleeves to help. The company plans to release a raft of new A.I. products this year and plug the technology into many of its existing ones. (This week, it began testing a new Gmail feature that allows users to compose A.I.-generated emails.)

On Thursday, Mr. Pichai expressed both optimism and worry about the state of the A.I. race.

He gave a blunt assessment of Bard, the ChatGPT competitor that Google released last week to tepid reviews: “I feel like we took a souped-up Civic and kind of put it in a race with more powerful cars.” (He also broke some news: Bard, which currently runs on a version of an A.I. language model called LaMDA, will soon be upgraded to a more powerful model, known as PaLM.)

He reacted to a recent open letter, signed by nearly 2,000 technology leaders and researchers, that urged companies to pause development of powerful A.I. systems for at least six months to prevent “profound risks to society.” Mr. Pichai doesn’t agree with all of the letter’s details — and he wouldn’t commit to slowing down Google’s A.I. efforts — but he said that the letter’s cautionary message was “worth being out there.”

And he talked about the “whiplash” he often feels when it comes to A.I. these days, as some people urge companies like Google to move faster on A.I., release more products and take bigger risks, while others urge them to slow down and be more cautious.

“You will see us be bold and ship things,” he said, “but we are going to be very responsible in how we do it.”

Here are some other highlights of Mr. Pichai’s remarks:

On the initial, lukewarm reception for Google’s Bard chatbot:

On whether ChatGPT’s success came as a surprise:

On his worries about tech companies racing toward A.I. advancements:

On the return of Larry Page and Sergey Brin:

On the open letter, signed by nearly 2,000 A.I. researchers and tech luminaries including Elon Musk, that urged companies to pause development of powerful A.I. systems for at least six months:

On whether he’s worried about the danger of creating artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., an A.I. that surpasses human intelligence:

On why climate change activism makes him hopeful about A.I.: