In a Bloomberg interview Wednesday evening in downtown San Francisco, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai pushed again in opposition to considerations that AI may ultimately make half the corporate’s 180,000-person workforce redundant. As an alternative, Pichai burdened the corporate’s dedication to development by way of at the very least subsequent 12 months.
“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 stated, including that AI is making engineers extra productive by eliminating tedious duties and enabling them to concentrate on extra impactful work. Reasonably than changing staff, 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 in recent times, although to date, cuts in 2025 seem like extra focused than in earlier years. It reportedly parted methods with lower than 100 folks in Google’s cloud division earlier this 12 months and, extra not too long ago, a whole bunch extra in its platforms and gadgets unit. In 2024 and 2023, the cuts have been much more extreme, with 12,000 folks dropped from the corporate in 2023 and at the very least one other 1,000 workers laid off final 12 months.
Trying ahead, Pichai pointed to Alphabet’s increasing ventures like Waymo autonomous autos, quantum computing initiatives, and YouTube’s explosive development as proof of innovation alternatives that frequently 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 latest feedback that AI may erode half of entry-level white collar jobs inside 5 years, “I respect that . . .I believe it’s necessary to voice these considerations and debate them.”
Because the interview wrapped up, Pichai was requested in regards to the limits of AI, and whether or not it’s potential that the world may by no means obtain synthetic basic intelligence, which means AI that’s as sensible as people at the whole lot. He rapidly paused earlier than answering. “There’s loads of ahead progress forward with the paths we’re on, not solely the set of concepts we’re engaged on at present, [but] a few of the newer concepts we’re experimenting with,” he stated.
“I’m very optimistic on seeing loads of progress. However ,” he added, “you’ve all the time had these know-how curves the place chances are you’ll hit a short lived plateau. So are we at the moment on an absolute path to AGI? I don’t assume anybody can say for positive.”
