alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai took to the stage Wednesday at a Stanford University event hosted by the university’s business school to discuss how he thinks about running one of the world’s most valuable technology companies. Provided some small insights.
Pichai has been a bit unwell lately, so this was a notable appearance. Google is widely perceived to be slow and behind the curve in its approach to generative AI. microsoft-Funded OpenAI. Mr. Pichai’s company has focused on AI for much of the past decade, even though Google researchers have written: Transformer model forming paper That was the very beginning of the generative AI revolution. Most recently, Alphabet’s Gemini LLM was accused of producing bizarrely inaccurate images of historical situations, such as depicting America’s Founding Fathers as black and Native American rather than white British, and overcorrecting for certain biases. suggested.
The interviewer is the dean of Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Jonathan Levinwasn’t exactly a hostile inquisitor—revealing at the end that their two sons once played together in a middle school band—and Pichai revealed more about his thinking. As a question, you skillfully answer a difficult question. rather than answering directly. However, there were some interesting points during the lecture.
At one point, Mr. Levin asked what Mr. Pichai was going to do to keep his 200,000-employee company innovating against all the startups fighting to disrupt its business. That’s clearly something Pichai is concerned about.
“To be honest, this is a question that has kept me up at night for years,” he began. “One of the inherent properties of technology is that small external teams can always develop great things. And history has shown us that. Scale doesn’t always get you – regulators may not agree. But I’ve always felt that at least when you’re running a company, you’re susceptible to somebody in the garage who has a better idea. How does a risk-taking culture become ingrained? How do you instigate it? These are all things that you really have to put a lot of effort into, at least in large organizations. I think there’s a trend. One of the most counterintuitive things I’ve ever seen is that the more successful things are, the more risk-averse people become. It’s very It’s counterintuitive: Small companies often make most of the decisions to bet on a company, but the bigger the company gets, the more true it is for large universities, and the more true it is for large corporations. They realize that they have more to lose, or that they have more to lose. And they find themselves taking fewer risks and being less ambitious. So they need to consciously do so. We need to encourage our teams to do that.”
He did not mention specific tactics that have proven successful at Google, but instead noted how difficult it is to create the right incentives.
“One of the things I think about a lot is how do we reward hard work, risk-taking, and good execution, not necessarily results? It’s easy to think that you should be rewarded for results. But then people start turning it into a game, right? People accept conservative things that yield good results. ”
He recalled a time when Google was willing to take strange risks, pointing specifically to the company’s ill-fated Google Glass. Although it didn’t work out, this was one of the first devices he experimented with augmented reality.
“circleWe recently talked about going back to the concept of Google Labs from Google’s early days. So we’re preparing to make it easier to release something without having to constantly worry about the weight of building a full brand or Google product. How can we release something in an easier way, in a more lightweight way? How can we more easily prototype it internally and then give it to people?”
Levin then asked Pichai about the progress he’s most excited about this year.
First, he cited the multimodality of Google’s latest LLM, the ability to process different types of input such as video and text simultaneously.
“Currently, all our AI models are already using Gemini 1.5 Pro. It is a million context windows and is multimodal. It processes huge amounts of information in all types of modalities on the input side. And I think the ability to provide that on the output side is amazing in a way that we haven’t fully processed.”
Next, he highlighted the ability to combine different individual answers to provide a smarter workflow. “Today, we use the LLM simply as an information retrieval; Chaining them together in a way that allows you to work on your workflow can be very powerful. “Maybe Stanford Hospital’s billing system will be a little easier,” he joked.
you can Watch the entire interview An interview with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell that preceded the event was also posted on YouTube. Levin and Pichai started at around 1 hour and 18 minutes.