In a Bloomberg interview Wednesday evening in downtown San Francisco, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai pushed again towards considerations that AI may finally make half the corporate’s 180,000-person workforce redundant. As an alternative, Pichai pressured the corporate’s dedication to development by means of at the very least subsequent yr.
“I anticipate we are going to develop from our present engineering part even into subsequent yr, as a result of it permits us to do extra,” Pichai mentioned, including that AI is making engineers extra productive by eliminating tedious duties and enabling them to give attention to extra impactful work. Slightly 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 in recent times, although to date, cuts in 2025 look like extra focused than in earlier years. It reportedly parted methods with lower than 100 people in Google’s cloud division earlier this yr and, extra just lately, hundreds more in its platforms and units unit. In 2024 and 2023, the cuts have been way more extreme, with 12,000 people dropped from the corporate in 2023 and at the very least one other 1,000 employees laid off final yr.
Trying ahead, Pichai pointed to Alphabet’s increasing ventures like Waymo autonomous automobiles, quantum computing initiatives, and YouTube’s explosive development 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 mentioned making an attempt to suppose 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 recent comments that AI may erode half of entry-level white collar jobs inside 5 years, “I respect that . . .I feel it’s necessary to voice these considerations and debate them.”
Because the interview wrapped up, Pichai was requested concerning 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 every little thing. He shortly paused earlier than answering. “There’s lots 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 mentioned.
“I’m very optimistic on seeing lots of progress. However you recognize,” he added, “you’ve at all times had these expertise curves the place it’s possible you’ll hit a short lived plateau. So are we at present on an absolute path to AGI? I don’t suppose anybody can say for positive.”
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