In a Bloomberg interview Wednesday evening in downtown San Francisco, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai pushed again towards considerations that AI may ultimately make half the corporate’s 180,000-person workforce redundant. As a substitute, Pichai harassed the corporate’s dedication to development by way of not less than 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 give attention to 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 lately, although up to now, 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 12 months and, extra not too long ago, hundreds more in its platforms and gadgets unit. In 2024 and 2023, the cuts have been much more extreme, with 12,000 people dropped from the corporate in 2023 and not less than one other 1,000 employees laid off final 12 months.
Wanting 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 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 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 believe it’s essential 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 attainable that the world may by no means obtain synthetic common intelligence, which means AI that’s as good as people at all the things. He rapidly paused earlier than answering. “There’s quite a lot of ahead progress forward with the paths we’re on, not solely the set of concepts we’re engaged on as we speak, [but] a number of the newer concepts we’re experimenting with,” he stated.
“I’m very optimistic on seeing quite a lot of progress. However you already know,” he added, “you’ve at all times had these expertise curves the place you could hit a short lived plateau. So are we at the moment on an absolute path to AGI? I don’t suppose anybody can say for certain.”
