“‘We’ve been cautious. There are areas where we’ve chosen not to be the first to put a product out. We’ve set up good structures around responsible AI. You will continue to see us take our time.’”
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Chief Executive Sundar Pichai admits there are some places where Google is “behind” in artificial intelligence, but he has vowed not to rush the company’s rollout of AI products.
Pichai told Bloomberg News in a recent interview that Google was focused on deploying AI in a responsible way, and he expressed confidence in the company’s positioning with this technological revolution over the long run.
“There are areas where we do better,” he said in the interview. “There are areas where we are behind. I view this as a very, very early time.”
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He acknowledged that Google faces various trade-offs as people clamor to do more with AI, since the company needs to ensure it retains its trustworthy reputation with consumers. AI chatbots, like Google’s Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, are known to make factual errors, but there’s no room for inaccuracy when it comes to some of the things for which Google has become reliant, like parents asking the proper dosage of a children’s medicine for a certain age.
“It’s exciting because there are new use cases; people are responding to it,” he said. “It’s uncomfortable because it’s inherently generative. There are times it makes up things.”
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Still, Pichai expressed that he built Google “to be AI native for a long time,” and he said the company is in a better place during the AI race than it was during the transition to mobile dominance years back.
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