Is There An AI Bubble?, Google CEO Pichai Confronted On AI, Defends Massive AI Investments | AI1G

if the government wants, whether it's with Gemini, our main foundation models, our scientific tools like AlphaFold, or our open source work like Gemma. So I think there's a range of things that we can help the government of India with. James, I'm gonna ask you about the elephant in the room that everyone wants to know, which is jobs, right? Now, I was listening to some of the things you were saying at Davos, and it was very interesting. You were talking about how with every technology shift, there are jobs that change, that go away, and then there are jobs that get created. But they don't happen at the same time. There's a lag. So two questions. One, how do governments deal with this lag, right? Especially a young demography like India. And two, what do we have to do to ensure that we come out of this as a job creator? No, I think it's probably one of the most important questions that I think countries, governments, and society is gonna need to think through. And I think it's important to keep in mind that when you're thinking about the question of AI and jobs, it's actually worth thinking about specific tasks as opposed to whole jobs, because most jobs are made up of a constituency of different tasks. And when you look at that, you suddenly realize that, as you said, you may have some occupations that will decline. Many that will grow. And many more that will actually change. And I think it's important to keep that in mind. So what happens is, when you look at these questions sector by sector, or occupation by occupation, you see a lot of transitions going on. But to the question of what should governments do to make sure that, in fact, they are growing jobs and enabling the change that happens, I think one is to focus on skilling. One of the things that happens in all these transitions, whether it's people who are transitioning out of jobs that are declining, or jobs that are growing, or jobs that are changing, is that the skills required change. So investing in skills, and literacy, and so forth, I think is foundationally important. The other thing that's important is also the continued kind of investments that countries and governments like India are doing in infrastructure and innovation, because a lot of the jobs that will grow will come out of those investments in infrastructure, as well as investments in innovation. When you grow businesses, you grow companies, and you have innovation in the economy, that's what leads to job growth. So I think those investments in innovation, both in the infrastructure and innovation, but also in the skills, is what governments need to focus on. I think what you said is so important, that you cannot have sort of a macro view of jobs. You need to start understanding which tasks are gonna get impacted. You need to start planning for that. You need to start planning for which sector. So we really have some work to do to figure out where will we get hurt the most, what are the opportunities, and then plan for it. And I think that's an excellent advice. Absolutely. Sundar, if I may come back to you. The other elephant in the room, are we gonna see an AI bubble, or are we not, right? Now, a lot of CEOs, and you talk to enterprise CEOs, they are worried about really scaling up investments, because they're worried about, are they gonna be able to justify the cost, what will the board say, et cetera, et cetera. Help us understand, based on your experience, based on Alphabet's experience, how should CEOs deal with this question and deal with this problem today? You know, we live in a truly global world. I thought if I left the U.S., I could avoid this question. Like, no, no, but look, it shows, look, I think it's an extraordinary moment. I think we are investing to meet that moment, right? I think, I think in some of the context Demis has spoken about, this is the industrial revolution, but 10 times faster and 10 times larger. And if you go back and look at the railroad investments or the national highway system in the U.S., I mean, these are such leveraged investments, and you drive so much growth and value on top of that. I view this as a transformational moment like that. As Google, I think we are fortunate that we've been focused on this technology for over a decade, and be it search, be it YouTube, be it cloud, be it emerging businesses like Waymo or Isomorphic Labs, I think they are all getting better and growing based on this one technology underneath. So we can generate a return there. Just as an example, cloud alone in the last year, the backlog has doubled year on year to $240 billion. So that shows the potential for return on the other side. And so we are investing to meet that demand, and that's what makes this an exciting moment. So I think the investment makes sense given the progress in the technology we are seeing and the opportunities we see on top of it. Demis, I have to ask you the third elephant in the room, which is, what on earth is AGI? Because we keep hearing about it, and the more we hear about it, the more we feel like we're trying to build something that is gonna control all of us. And then the question is, why are we building it? So what is it? Is it really the end goal to control? Is the end goal to augment prosperity? And help us understand your take on it. And also, how should India be thinking about AGI? Or if we need to prepare, what should we be doing? Well, the first thing I'll say is that the reason I've worked my whole career on AI is because I think it could be the ultimate tool for accelerating scientific discovery in areas like medicine. So things like AlphaFold, I hope, will be the first of many advances showcasing that. And then we can apply that to help us tackle many of the challenges facing society today, from disease to climate to inequality. So I think AI on the upside, the opportunity, has an AGI, and the limit has that potential. In terms of defining what AGI is, I've always defined it, have a high bar for AGI, which is a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities that humans have. Now the reason that's important is the human reference point is because the brain is the only evidence that we have, the only existence proof we have that general intelligence is possible. So it's kind of, we won't really know we have a fully general system unless it's able to do a lot of things that we sometimes take for granted, things like creativity and long-term planning and better use of memory. And so today's systems, they're impressive, but they're not there yet, in my opinion. And I think we've still got a way to go, at least another five, 10 years to go. But certainly in the next phase, the next decade or two decades, I see it as the sort of ultimate enhancement tool for us, and human scientists, human experts, but also the youth of today, and this is what was exciting, seeing that in India here in this visit, is we'll have access to these incredible tools. So whatever that means, building businesses, creating art, I think they'll be sort of almost superpowered to do that with these access to these tools that you can access from anywhere, the most cutting-edge tools in the world from anywhere, including from India. So I think it's gonna be a very exciting moment, but there are also risks too that we have to take into account. You mentioned jobs earlier, but there's also technical risks of making sure these systems stay within their guardrails and they serve our purposes.