Google CEO Sundar Pichai maintains that AI is not going to exchange employees at the same time as a lot of his friends within the tech trade seem to imagine in any other case.
Pichai, who additionally leads Google father or mother Alphabet, stated that AI instruments will allow engineers to be extra productive and assist them concentrate on extra impactful work by automating tedious duties. He made these remarks whereas talking on the Bloomberg Tech convention held in San Francisco this week.
This comes amid a raging debate over the influence of AI on jobs that has been re-ignited after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stated that the know-how would erode half of all entry-level jobs inside the subsequent 5 years. In response to Amodei’s latest feedback, Pichai stated, “I respect that . . .I feel it’s necessary to voice these considerations and debate them.”
“We’ve made predictions like that for the final 20 years about know-how and automation, and it hasn’t fairly performed out that approach,” he added. On whether or not AI may finally make half the corporate’s 1,80,000-person workforce redundant, Pichai stated, “I anticipate we’ll develop from our present engineering part even into subsequent 12 months, as a result of it permits us to do extra.”
Pichai has beforehand talked about that over 30 per cent of Google’s code is AI-generated. Nevertheless, he continues to check with AI as an ‘accelerator’ that can drive new product growth and create demand for extra workers. Up to now in 2025, Google has laid off round 100 workers from its cloud division. This quantity is much fewer than when the corporate reduce 12,000 jobs and 1,000 jobs in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
What else did Pichai say?
On the restrictions of AI and whether or not it’s potential for the world to attain synthetic normal intelligence (AGI), an AI system that performs duties on-par or higher than a human, Pichai stated, “There’s numerous ahead progress forward with the paths we’re on, not solely the set of concepts we’re engaged on at this time, [but] among the newer concepts we’re experimenting with.”
“I’m very optimistic on seeing numerous progress. However you recognize, you’ve all the time had these know-how curves the place you might hit a brief plateau. So are we at the moment on an absolute path to AGI? I don’t suppose anybody can say for positive,” he added.
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Pichai was additionally optimistic about different applied sciences and improvements equivalent to Alphabet-owned Waymo autonomous autos in addition to Google’s quantum computing initiatives and YouTube’s explosive progress in international locations like India.