Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai gestures at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on January 22, 2020.
Fabrice Coferini | AFP | Getty Images
Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai told employees last week that “the stakes are high” in 2025 as the company faces increasing competition and regulatory hurdles and deals with rapid advances in artificial intelligence.
According to information obtained by CNBC, at the 2025 strategy meeting held on December 18, Pichai and other Google leaders wore ugly holiday sweaters and hyped up the coming year, especially content related to the future of artificial intelligence.
“I think 2025 will be critical,” Pichai said. “I think we have to recognize the urgency of this moment and move faster as a company. The stakes are high. These are disruptive moments. Through 2025, we need to be relentlessly focused on unlocking The advantages of this technology are to solve the actual problems of users.
Some employees attended the meeting in person at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, while others participated virtually.
Pichai’s comments come after Google experienced its most intense pressure since it went public two decades ago. While areas such as search advertising and the cloud delivered strong revenue growth, competition in Google’s core markets intensified and the company faced internal challenges, including culture clashes and concerns about Pichai’s vision for the future.
Additionally, regulations are now more stringent than ever before.
In August, a federal judge ruled that Google illegally monopolized the search market. In November last year, the Justice Department asked Google to force the divestment of its Chrome web browser unit. In a separate case, the Justice Department accused the company of illegally dominating online advertising technology. The trial ended in September pending a judge’s ruling.
In the same month, the UK competition regulator issued a statement against Google’s advertising technology practices, which the regulator temporarily believed to be affecting competition in the UK.
“It’s not lost on me that we’re facing scrutiny around the world,” Pichai said. “It’s tied to our scale and success. It’s part of a broader trend where technology is impacting society on a massive scale. So, in this moment, more than ever, we have to make sure we don’t get distracted.”
A Google spokesman declined to comment.
Google’s search business still dominates the market, but generative artificial intelligence is providing people with new ways to obtain online information and bringing in many new competitors.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT kicked off the hype cycle in late 2022, with investors including Microsoft The company has since been valued at $157 billion. In July, OpenAI announced that it would launch its own search engine. Perplexity is also promoting its artificial intelligence-driven search service and recently completed a $500 million financing round at a $9 billion valuation.
Google is investing heavily, primarily through its artificial intelligence model Gemini, to stay ahead. The Gemini app gives users access to a number of tools, including Google’s chatbot.
Pichai said “building big new businesses” is a top priority. That includes the Gemini app, which executives say they believe is Google’s next app to reach 500 million users. The company currently has 15 apps that meet this standard.
“The Gemini app has gained momentum, especially over the past few months,” Pichai said. “But we still have some work to do by 2025 to close the gap and establish leadership.”
“Expanding Gemini on the consumer side will be our biggest focus next year,” Pichai later added.
“You don’t always have to be first”
At the meeting, Pichai showed a chart of large language models, in which Gemini 1.5 was ahead of competitors such as OpenAI’s GPT.
Pichai said, “I expect there will be some ups and downs in 2025.” “I think we’re going to be the most advanced.”
He acknowledged that Google had to catch up.
“Historically, you don’t always have to be first, but you have to execute well and really be the best in class,” he said. “I think that’s what 2025 is about.”
Executives answered questions submitted by employees through Google’s internal system. One comment read aloud by Pichai suggested that ChatGPT “is becoming as synonymous with artificial intelligence as Google Search is,” and the questioner asked, “What are our plans for dealing with this in the next year? Or are we less Concerned about consumers facing LLM?
For answers, Pichai turned to DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, who said the team will “turbocharge” the Gemini app and that the company has seen an increase in users since launching the app in February. . “The products themselves are going to change dramatically over the next year or two,” he said.
Hassabis described a vision of a universal assistant that “operates seamlessly in any domain, in any mode, or on any device.”
Project Astra, an experimental version of Google’s Universal Assistant The company announced in May that it would be updated in the first half of the year.
Another employee asked whether Google could scale its AI products for $200 a month “like other companies.”
“Currently, we don’t have any plans for such a subscription level,” Kazakhs responded, adding that he thinks Gemini Advanced’s $20 per month cost is a good deal. “I’m not necessarily saying never, but there are no plans right now.”
As the meeting came to an end, Google welcomed Josh Woodward, head of Google Labs, to the stage. He takes the microphone and the Zombie Nation song “Kernkraft 400” plays loudly in the background.
“I’m going to try to do six presentations in eight minutes,” said Woodward, who is known for his high energy.
Woodward first showed Jules, a coding assistant in a trusted tester program. “This is the future of software development,” he said.
Woodward then turned to NotebookLM, an artificial intelligence note-taking product, which received a series of updates in 2024, including podcasting tools. Woodward demonstrated how the company is trying out a new feature that allows users to “call in” to podcasts.
He then turned to Project Mariner, a multitasking Chrome extension powered by artificial intelligence. Woodward asked it to add top restaurants from tripadvisor to the map app. After a short pause, the demonstration was successful, and bursts of applause broke out from the employees present.
Throughout the meeting, Pichai kept reminding employees of the need to “keep up the fight.” Google has gone through an extensive cost-cutting phase, including laying off about 6% of its workforce in 2023, and continues to focus on efficiency.
As of the end of the third quarter, Alphabet had 181,269 employees, a decrease of approximately 5% from the end of 2022.
Pichai once mentioned Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who started the company 26 years ago before cloud computing or artificial intelligence tools. Appear.
“In the early days of Google, if you look at how the founders built our data center, every decision they made was very scrappy,” Pichai said. “Often, constraints lead to creativity. Not all problems can be solved with headcount.”
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