Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks about employees joining OpenAI

Google’s parent company Alphabet had announced its plan to cut around six percent of the global workforce or around 12,000 employees owing to pressure from investors to reduce spending due to the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. 

Speaking to Bloomberg about the ex-Google employees joining rival companies like OpenAI, Pichai said, “Googlers have left to create over 2,000 startups, last I counted, and I think that’s great. Some of them are cloud customers down the line for us. Some of them come back. I think it’s healthy.”

Pichai also spoke about the recent cost-cutting measures undertaken by many companies in Silicon Valley including Google, he said, “Our work toward sharpening our focus—I view it as enduring work. We are constantly trying to make the company more efficient.”

The Google CEO also admitted that his company’s generative AI-based chatbot Bard lacks behind the competition in some areas while noting that these are very early days for the technology. He also talked about the competition in the AI space noting that he has built Google to be AI native for a long time.

Pichai also spoke about the risks posed by the new age generative AI-based technologies, he said, “We should definitely make sure we’re focused on risks of bias or misinformation, safety incidents and so on. There will be serious issues with deepfakes. We need to take it all seriously.”

Many prominent people in the artificial intelligence sector including Google and OpenAI had called for mitigating the risks of AI in a recent statement. The letter read, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Updated: 14 Jun 2023, 07:49 AM IST