During an interview with Bloomberg Wednesday night in downtown San Francisco, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai claimed he was not worried about the rise of AI.
Indeed, he dismissed concerns that the technology could result in the layoffs of half of his company's 180,000 employees. And to emphasize this statement, he did not hesitate to insist on the fact that his company must pursue its growth objectives until next year.
A help rather than a threat?
While AI has experienced a meteoric rise in recent months in many areas, Sundar Pichai does not seem worried about his company and its employees. Indeed, he added the following during his interview: “I expect our current engineering phase to continue until next year, because it allows us to do more.”
Thus, according to him, artificial intelligence improves the productivity of these engineers by eliminating tedious tasks, which encourages them to focus on important objectives. However, while this tool can bring major benefits, recent times have not been easy for Alphabet.
It must be said that numerous layoffs have taken place in previous years, and that in 2025, these budget cuts would be targeted towards certain sectors. Indeed, the company reportedly cut around 100 jobs in Google's Cloud division and hundreds more in the platform and device division.
A bright future for Alphabet?
Nevertheless, while the layoffs show that Alphabet isn't doing as well as it claims, the future could be more positive by creating new jobs. It must be said that Pichai highlighted various projects such as Waymo self-driving cars, quantum computing initiatives and the exponential growth of YouTube.
But he still believes that it is useless to project too far into the future. However, he did address the comments of Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, who believes that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years: “I respect that… I think it’s important to voice those concerns and to debate them.”
Finally, he spoke about the future of AI and its potential ability to equal or even surpass humans in the more or less distant future: “There’s a lot of progress to come in the areas we’re working on now, not only the ideas we’re working on today, but also some of the newer ideas we’re experimenting with. I’m very optimistic about the significant progress to come. But you know, there have always been technology curves where you can hit a temporary plateau. So are we currently on the path to IAG? I don't think anyone can say that for sure."
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