Saturday, May 02, 2026

2: Google

How Sundar Pichai Pushed Google To the Front of the AI Race its massive advantages in funding, infrastructure, and talent mean it may be the behemoth best positioned to win the AI long game, many analysts argue. ........ Pichai carries strong values into his work—economic uplift, compassion for migrants—and says his quest is to build useful things for as many people as possible. But his fiercely competitive nature is undeniable too. ........... “If he wants to do something, you’re not going to be able to stop him. He’s just going to be super nice about it,” says Caesar Sengupta, one of Pichai’s longtime former Google lieutenants. “And then, you cannot move him.” ............... Some 8,700 miles separate Pichai’s current home in Silicon Valley from his birthplace. He was raised in Chennai, a southern Indian metropolis, in a modest house; he and his brother slept on the living-room floor. Growing up, his family progressively gained a series of transformative technologies: a water heater, a refrigerator, a rotary telephone. When the phone arrived, so too did his neighbors, flocking to his house to call their families or the hospital for medical records. .................. But the rollouts were agonizingly slow. It took five years to get off a government wait list to secure a telephone. ....... Pichai arrived in the U.S. in 1993, where he earned master’s degrees in science and business from Stanford and Wharton before joining Google in 2004 in product management—the same month Gmail launched. He quickly rose through the ranks because of his ambition, work ethic, and instinct for what users wanted ................. In Silicon Valley, there are a handful of archetypal leaders, like Steve Jobs as the visionary or Zuckerberg as the engineer. Pichai is the ultimate product leader ................ “He has this ability to fully simulate a product in his head, and how it will be received and used by end customers,” says Clay Bavor, a former Google executive who worked directly under Pichai for a decade. “He has an exceptional sense for craft and the details in a product, all the way down to the pixels on the screen, the sound of a voice, the tactile feedback.” .............

in 2016, Pichai announced that Google would be shifting its priority from mobile-first to AI-first experiences. “This paves the future for Google for the next 10 years or so,” he declared in an internal meeting that year.

................. Perhaps the most pivotal decision of Pichai’s career was his conviction about the internal importance of DeepMind. After the success of AlphaGo, Hassabis wanted to spin DeepMind out of Google, into an independent company that prioritized safety over profits. Other Google executives, including co-founder Page, were fine with this proposed arrangement, journalist Sebastian Mallaby reported in The Infinity Machine, a new book on Hassabis. ................

But while Hassabis pushed for multiple years for DeepMind’s independence, Pichai ultimately rebuffed the effort. He needed DeepMind not only to advance science independently, but also to help him integrate AI into Google’s products.

............ Google had also made the lion’s share of its money on search advertisement—in 2023, the category accounted for 55% of its revenue. Plunging into AI search threatened to decimate that business. .............. Pichai was ready to pivot. His investment in TPUs put Google in position to massively build out its AI data-center infrastructure while partially avoiding the so-called Nvidia tax—the premium companies pay for the chips that power AI. And Google was sitting on a ton of data to train on—thanks to its search index and YouTube—as well as a mountain of cash from its overflowing profits. ................ “People realize if you all pull together, you can quickly make a difference,” says Reid, the VP of search. “And that gives people a kind of high.” ................

When Google rushed out a rival chatbot in early 2023, it falsely claimed that the Webb telescope took the first picture of a planet beyond our solar system, causing Alphabet’s market value to plummet $100 billion in a day. A year later, when Google released AI Overviews in search, it told a user to eat one small rock a day.

.................. “When we built Chrome, we had 1% market share one year after we launched,” he says. In fact, if you look at Google’s history, it has virtually never been first to a new tech product, whether it be web browser, search, mail, or maps. But its distribution channels, resources, and talent allowed it to close gaps fast. ............ and the honing of chain-of-thought reasoning, in which LLMs take longer to think about their answers—leading to better results. ............... Pichai asks Gemini for conversational advice before he meets with other CEOs. Sometimes, Gemini will return a “superficial answer,” Pichai says, to which he responds: “Tell me something that could really be on his or her mind.” “And I get really insightful things which makes for a more human connection, because that’s actually what they are worried about,” he says. ...............

the company crossed $400 billion in annual revenue for the first time.

................ AI has been integrated into Google Search, Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Docs, and Photos, meaning that people who aren’t even seeking out AI are now engaging with it. No other company delivers AI to so many people in so many places. .............. Millions of users have turned to research tool NotebookLM to synthesize information. Waymo’s self-driving cars have achieved mundanity on the streets of cities like Austin and Los Angeles, with London their next stop. YouTube has transformed from a money pit into a subscriber behemoth and legitimate television replacement earning over $60 billion a year. Neal Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, says that Pichai has played a crucial role in YouTube’s growth, including in its development of new AI production tools for creators. “His insights foreshadow these huge trends, but they’re also very, very precise,” he says. .................... In San Francisco, the developer Jose Portilla is building a startup that uses AI tools to create personalized picture books and TV shows for kids. Portilla uses Nano Banana to generate images, and Gemini to build stories and voice the characters. ............ In March, a California jury found Meta and YouTube liable for harming a young user through addictive design features that contributed to her mental-health distress; YouTube was ordered to pay $1.8 million. Similar dynamics have made AI systems dangerously sycophantic. In October, a man who had developed a relationship with Gemini died by suicide after Gemini promised him an eternity together; the man’s estate sued Google. “This shows that safety is, at best, a second thought for them,” said Jay Edelson, the plaintiff’s lawyer. ................... internal documents show that the company fretted over its inability to control how Israel used their technology. .......... when Pichai himself participated in an employee protest against the President’s immigration policies. .......... In February, more than a thousand Google workers signed an open letter demanding the company end its partnerships with DHS and ICE. An additional 100 DeepMind employees signed a letter asking Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, for “red lines” around the usage of Gemini by the Pentagon for surveilling American citizens or piloting autonomous weapons without a human in the loop. (Google has 190,000 employees; DeepMind has around 6,000.) .................. “Google’s products are used for violent purposes domestically and abroad,” he wrote in an email to TIME. “I don’t want to work for a digital weapons manufacturer, and many of my colleagues are against this drift towards militarization. But they are afraid to speak out due to the justified fear of retaliation.” (Google fired 28 employees who staged a sit-in against the company’s contracts with Israel in 2024.) .............. Pichai says that “all of us, including the government, are aligned on humans in the loop, and the technology not being used for mass surveillance in a way that contradicts human rights.” Asked to respond to Samburov, he says: “I think it’s a very nuanced issue. We all have a role responsibly, to invest in the national security of democracies around the world ... I think we’ve long, more than any other company in the world, had a culture where employees speak up.” .......................

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