In a Bloomberg interview Wednesday evening in downtown San Francisco, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai pushed again in opposition to issues that AI might finally make half the corporate’s 180,000-person workforce redundant. As an alternative, Pichai pressured the corporate’s dedication to progress by means of at the least subsequent 12 months.
“I count on we are going to develop from our present engineering part even into subsequent 12 months, as a result of it permits us to do extra,” Pichai stated, including that AI is making engineers extra productive by eliminating tedious duties and enabling them to deal with extra impactful work. Relatively than changing employees, he referred to AI as “an accelerator” that can drive new product growth, thereby creating demand for extra workers.
Alphabet has staged quite a few layoffs lately, although to date, cuts in 2025 look like extra focused than in earlier years. It reportedly parted methods with lower than 100 individuals in Google’s cloud division earlier this 12 months and, extra lately, a whole bunch extra in its platforms and gadgets unit. In 2024 and 2023, the cuts had been way more extreme, with 12,000 individuals dropped from the corporate in 2023 and at the least one other 1,000 workers laid off final 12 months.
Wanting ahead, Pichai pointed to Alphabet’s increasing ventures like Waymo autonomous autos, quantum computing initiatives, and YouTube’s explosive progress as proof of innovation alternatives that regularly bubble up. He famous YouTube’s scale in India alone, with 100 million channels and 15,000 channels boasting over a million subscribers.
At one level, Pichai stated attempting to assume too far forward is “pointless.” However he additionally acknowledged the legitimacy of fears about job displacement, saying when requested about Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s current feedback that AI might erode half of entry-level white collar jobs inside 5 years, “I respect that . . .I feel it’s necessary to voice these issues and debate them.”
Because the interview wrapped up, Pichai was requested concerning the limits of AI, and whether or not it’s doable that the world may by no means obtain synthetic basic intelligence, that means AI that’s as good as people at every little thing. He shortly paused earlier than answering. “There’s a whole lot of ahead progress forward with the paths we’re on, not solely the set of concepts we’re engaged on immediately, [but] among the newer concepts we’re experimenting with,” he stated.
“I’m very optimistic on seeing a whole lot of progress. However you recognize,” he added, “you’ve at all times had these know-how curves the place you could hit a brief plateau. So are we at present on an absolute path to AGI? I don’t assume anybody can say for positive.”
