Sundar Pichai Discusses Innovation Challenges in Large Companies and His Excitement for This Year
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai presented at a Stanford event organized by the university’s business school on Wednesday, providing slight glimpses into his approach to managing one of the top tech companies globally.
Pichai’s appearance was significant as he has been navigating difficult times recently. Google is widely seen to have been late to the game in generative AI, lagging behind the Microsoft-backed OpenAI. This perception exists even though Google, under Pichai, has been focusing on AI for most of the past ten years, and Google researchers published the foundational paper on transformer models that sparked the generative AI revolution. Recently, Alphabet’s Gemini LLM was criticized for bizarrely incorrect images of historical events, such as portraying America’s founding fathers as Black or Native American instead of white English men, indicating an over-compensation for specific biases.
The interviewer, Stanford Graduate School of Business Dean Jonathan Levin, was not particularly adversarial. He revealed at the conclusion that the two men’s sons once performed in a middle school band together. Pichai is skilled at addressing difficult questions by reframing them as explorations of his thought process rather than direct responses. Nonetheless, the conversation yielded some intriguing insights.
Levin queried Pichai on his tactics to ensure a 200,000-employee company continues to innovate amid the startups vying to disrupt its business. Evidently, this is a concern for Pichai.
“Honestly, it’s a question which has always kept me up at night through the years,” he started. “One of the inherent characteristics of technology is you can always develop something amazing with a small team from the outside. And history has shown that. Scale doesn’t always give you — regulators may not agree, but at least running the company, I’ve always felt you’re always susceptible to someone in a garage with a better idea. So I think, I think how do you as a company move fast? How do you have the culture of risk-taking? How do you incent for that? These are all things which you actually have to work at it a lot. I think at least larger organizations tend to default. One of the most counter-intuitive things I’ve seen is, the more successful things are, the more risk averse people become. It’s so counter-intuitive. You would often find smaller companies almost make decisions which bet the company, but the bigger you are, it’s true for large university, it’s true a large company, you have a lot more to lose, or you perceive you have a lot more to lose. And so you find you don’t take as many ambitious risk-taking initiatives. So you have to consciously do that. You have to push teams to do that.”
Google pauses AI tool Gemini’s ability to generate images of people after historical inaccuracies
He didn’t offer any specific tactics that have proven successful at Google, but instead noted how difficult it is to create the proper incentives.
“One example for this is I think a lot about is how do you reward effort and risk-taking and good execution, and not always outcomes. It’s easy to think you should reward outcomes. But then people start gaming it, right? People take conservative things in which you will get a good outcome.”
There was a period in the past when Google was more open to taking unconventional risks, he recalls, noting Google Glass as noteworthy. Despite it being unsuccessful, it was among the initial devices to delve into augmented reality experimentation.
“We mentioned recently about returning to a concept prevalent in Google’s early days known as Google Labs. So, we’re setting things up in a way that makes it simpler to roll out things without constantly being concerned about maintaining the Google’s brand reputation or the implications of launching a Google product. How can we make something available in a simpler and lighter way? How do we enable easier internal prototyping and its distribution to the public?”
Later on, Pichai was asked about the innovations he was particularly looking forward to this year.
Firstly, he singled out the Google’s latest LLM’s multimodality – that is, its capability to handle different types of inputs like video and text at the same time.
“All our AI models now already are using Gemini 1.5 Pro; that’s a 1 million context window and it’s multimodal. The ability to process huge amounts of information in any type of modality on the input side and give it on the output side, I think it’s it’s mind blowing in a way that we haven’t fully processed.”
Second, he highlighted the ability of connecting different discrete answers together to provide smarter workflows. “Where today you’re using the LLMs as just an information-seeking thing, but chaining them together in a way that you can kind of tackle workflows, that’s going to be extraordinarily powerful. It could maybe make your billing system in Stanford Hospital a bit easier,” he joked.
You can watch the entire interview, along 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.
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