Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said the company will continue to hire engineers until at least 2026, despite its heavy investment in artificial intelligence. He made the remarks at the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco.
Despite a wave of layoffs in the industry, including at Microsoft, due to the high costs of developing AI, Alphabet has no plans to reduce its engineering staff. Pichai believes that engineers remain a key resource, and AI will help them work more efficiently by freeing them from routine tasks.
At the same time, he was cautious about the prospect of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), saying that it is not yet possible to say with certainty whether we are actually moving in that direction. While models are good at coding, they still make basic mistakes.
Pichai also addressed media concerns about Google's new AI-powered answer features, which publishers fear will drive traffic away from their sites. In response, he said the company is committed to driving users to its website and intentionally designed AI Overviews to retain quality traffic.
Pichai, who has led Google since 2015, said the company's next CEO will have an "extraordinary AI assistant," joking about the future of management.
By the way, at the same conference, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said that Silicon Valley is changing its attitude towards cooperation with the defense sector. Last week, Meta signed an agreement with Anduril Industries to develop products for the US Army, including an AI helmet with VR and AR functions.
Recall, it also recently became known that the Swedish fintech company Klarna has started hiring again, although it previously stated that AI would replace the support service.