Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage on Wednesday at a Stanford event held by the university’s business school, offering some small insights into how he thinks about running certainly one of the world’s most respected tech firms.
It was a notable appearance because Pichai’s been having a little bit of a rough go currently. Google is widely perceived to have gotten a late start on generative AI, trailing behind Microsoft-funded OpenAI. That’s despite the incontrovertible fact that the corporate under Pichai has been specializing in AI for the higher a part of the last decade, and Google researchers wrote the formative paper on transformer models that basically kicked off the generative AI revolution. More recently, Alphabet’s Gemini LLM was excoriated for generating bizarrely inaccurate images of historical situations, reminiscent of depicting America’s founding fathers as Black or Native American, slightly than white English men, suggesting an overcorrection for certain sorts of bias.
The interviewer, Stanford Graduate School of Business Dean Jonathan Levin, wasn’t exactly a hostile inquisitor — at the tip, he revealed that the 2 men’s sons had once played in a middle school band together — and Pichai is deft at answering difficult questions by posing them as further questions on how he thinks, slightly than with direct answers. But there have been a pair nuggets of interest through the talk.
At one point, Levin asked what Pichai tried to do to maintain an organization of 200,000 people innovating against all of the startups battling to disrupt its business. It’s obviously something Pichai worries about.
“Truthfully, it’s an issue which has at all times kept me up at night through the years,” he began. “One among the inherent characteristics of technology is you may at all times develop something amazing with a small team from the surface. And history has shown that. Scale doesn’t at all times offer you — regulators may not agree, but not less than running the corporate, I’ve at all times felt you’re at all times prone to someone in a garage with a greater idea. So I feel, I feel how do you as an organization move fast? How do you’ve gotten the culture of risk-taking? How do you incent for that? These are all things which you truly need to work at it lots. I feel not less than larger organizations are inclined to default. One of the vital counter-intuitive things I’ve seen is, the more successful things are, the more risk averse people change into. It’s so counter-intuitive. You’ll often find smaller firms almost make decisions which bet the corporate, but the larger you might be, it’s true for giant university, it’s true a big company, you’ve gotten lots more to lose, otherwise you perceive you’ve gotten lots more to lose. And so you discover you don’t take as many ambitious risk-taking initiatives. So you’ve gotten to consciously do this. You have got to push teams to try this.”
He didn’t offer any specific tactics which have proven successful at Google, but as a substitute noted how difficult it’s to create the right incentives.
“One example for that is I feel lots about is how do you reward effort and risk-taking and good execution, and never at all times outcomes. It’s easy to think you must reward outcomes. But then people start gaming it, right? People take conservative things during which you’re going to get an excellent end result.”
He hearkened back to an earlier time during which Google was more willing to take weird risks, in particularly pointing to the firm’s ill-fated Google Glass; it didn’t work out, however it was certainly one of the primary devices to experiment with augmented reality.
“We recently said, we went back to a notion we had in early Google of Google Labs. And so we’re setting a thing up by which it’s easier to place out something without at all times worrying about, you realize, the complete brand and the burden of constructing a Google product. How will you put out something in the simple way, the lighter weight way? How do you permit people to prototype more easily internally and get it out to people?”
Later, Levin asked what advances Pichai was most enthusiastic about this yr.
First, he cited the multimodality of Google’s latest LLM — that’s, its ability to process different sorts of inputs, reminiscent of video and text, concurrently.
“All our AI models now already are using Gemini 1.5 Pro; that’s a 1 million context window and it’s multimodal. The power to process huge amounts of data in any sort of modality on the input side and provides it on the output side, I feel it’s it’s mind blowing in a way that we haven’t fully processed.”
Second, he highlighted the flexibility of connecting different discrete answers together to supply smarter workflows. “Where today you’re using the LLMs as just an information-seeking thing, but chaining them together in a way which you could sort of tackle workflows, that’s going to be extraordinarily powerful. It could perhaps make your billing system in Stanford Hospital a bit easier,” he joked.
You may watch the complete interview, together with an interview with Fed Chairman Jerome Powell that happened prior to it, on YouTube. Levin and Pichai start around 1 hour and 18 minutes in.
