In a Bloomberg interview Wednesday night time in downtown San Francisco, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai pushed again in opposition to issues that AI may ultimately make half the corporate’s 180,000-person workforce redundant. As a substitute, Pichai pressured the corporate’s dedication to development by way of at the very least subsequent 12 months.
“I anticipate 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 mentioned, including that AI is making engineers extra productive by eliminating tedious duties and enabling them to concentrate on extra impactful work. Quite than changing employees, he referred to AI as “an accelerator” that may drive new product improvement, thereby creating demand for extra workers.
Alphabet has staged quite a few layoffs lately, although thus far, cuts in 2025 seem 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 just lately, tons of extra in its platforms and gadgets unit. In 2024 and 2023, the cuts had been much more extreme, with 12,000 individuals 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 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 mentioned 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 feel it’s essential 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 potential that the world may by no means obtain synthetic common intelligence, that means AI that’s as sensible as people at all the things. He rapidly paused earlier than answering. “There’s a variety 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 few of the newer concepts we’re experimenting with,” he mentioned.
“I’m very optimistic on seeing a variety of progress. However you already know,” he added, “you’ve at all times had these expertise curves the place you might hit a brief plateau. So are we at present on an absolute path to AGI? I don’t assume anybody can say for positive.”