In a Bloomberg interview Wednesday night time 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 a substitute, Pichai confused the corporate’s dedication to development by means of at the least subsequent 12 months.
“I anticipate we are going to develop from our present engineering section 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 deal with extra impactful work. Relatively than changing staff, he referred to AI as “an accelerator” that can drive new product growth, thereby creating demand for extra staff.
Alphabet has staged quite a few layoffs in recent times, although up to now, cuts in 2025 look 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 had been way more extreme, with 12,000 folks dropped from the corporate in 2023 and at the least one other 1,000 staff 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 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 stated 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 current feedback that AI may erode half of entry-level white collar jobs inside 5 years, “I respect that . . .I believe it’s vital 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 attainable that the world may by no means obtain synthetic normal intelligence, which means AI that’s as sensible as people at every little thing. He shortly paused earlier than answering. “There’s a whole lot of ahead progress forward with the paths we’re on, not solely the set of concepts we’re engaged on at the moment, [but] a number of the newer concepts we’re experimenting with,” he stated.
“I’m very optimistic on seeing a whole lot of progress. However you recognize,” he added, “you’ve at all times had these expertise curves the place you could 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.”
