Pichai says AI helps engineers focus on impactful work by reducing repetitive tasks.
Alphabet expects to grow its workforce in 2025 despite past layoffs.
He acknowledges concerns about AI replacing entry-level jobs but urges open debate.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken over our lives with a storm. With its growing use cases, we all have a question, will it take our jobs? In an interview with Bloomberg on Wednesday, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai answered the question. In a conversation, he said that AI is making engineers more productive, not obsolete and insisted the company expects to grow into next year.
“I expect we will grow from our current engineering phase even into next year, because it allows us to do more,” he said, adding that AI is reducing repetitive tasks and allowing people to focus on meaningful work. He referred to AI as an “accelerator” that will drive new product development and increase demand for more talent, not less.
For those who don’t know, Alphabet has been laying off employees gradually. According to reports, the company laid off 12,000 employees in 2023. The company reportedly cut more than 1,000 jobs last year. Although there have been targeted reductions this year, such as hundreds in the platform and devices unit and hundreds in the cloud division, we have not witnessed such widespread layoffs.
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However, Pichai mentioned Alphabet’s growth areas, such as self-driving technology at Waymo, YouTube’s scale, and long-term bets in quantum computing. Pichai expressed respect for Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s recent statement that AI could replace half of entry-level jobs within five years. “I think it’s important to express and debate those concerns,” he said.
Pichai remained cautious when asked if the world is moving towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can perform a variety of tasks just as well as a human. “There’s a lot of forward progress ahead… But are we currently on an absolute path to AGI? I don’t think anyone can say for sure.”
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Ashish Singh
Ashish Singh is the Chief Copy Editor at Digit. He's been wrangling tech jargon since 2020 (Times Internet, Jagran English '22). When not policing commas, he's likely fueling his gadget habit with coffee, strategising his next virtual race, or plotting a road trip to test the latest in-car tech. He speaks fluent Geek. View Full Profile
