Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage Wednesday at a Stanford event hosted by the university’s business school, offering some small insights into how he thinks about running one of the world’s most valuable technology companies.
It was a notable appearance because Pichai has been going through a bit of a difficult situation lately. Google is widely perceived to have started late with generative AI and fallen behind. microsoftOpenAI funded. This despite the fact that the Pichai-led company has focused on AI for most of the last decade, and Google researchers wrote the training document on transformer models that really started the generative AI revolution. More recently, Alphabet’s Gemini LLM came under fire for strangely generating inaccurate images of historical situationssuch as depicting America’s founding fathers as black or Native American, rather than white English men, suggesting an overcorrection for certain types of prejudice.
The interviewer, Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Jonathan Levin, wasn’t exactly a hostile inquisitor (in the end, he revealed that the two men’s children had played in a high school band together) and Pichai is adept at answering difficult questions by posing them as additional questions about how he thinks, rather than with direct answers. But there were a couple of points of interest during the talk.
At one point, Levin asked what Pichai was trying to do to keep a 200,000-person company innovative in the face of all the startups scrambling to disrupt its business. It’s obviously something that worries Pichai.
“Honestly, it’s a question that has always kept me up at night over the years,” he began. “One of the inherent characteristics of technology is that you can always develop something amazing with a small external team. And history has proven it. Scale doesn’t always work for you – regulators may not agree, but at least running the company, I’ve always felt that you’re always susceptible to someone in a garage with a better idea. So I think, how can you move quickly as a company? How do you have a risk-taking culture? How do you incentivize yourself for that? These are all things that you really have to work hard on. I think at least larger organizations tend to default on their obligations. One of the most counterintuitive things I’ve seen is that the more successful things become, the more risk averse people become. It’s so counterintuitive. You will often find that smaller companies almost make decisions that bet on the company, but the larger it is, it is true for a large university, it is true for a large company, you have a lot more to lose, or you perceive that you have a lot more to lose. lose. . And then you discover that you don’t take as many ambitious initiatives to take risks. So you have to do that consciously. “You have to push teams to do that.”
He didn’t offer any specific tactics that have proven successful at Google, instead pointing out how difficult it is to create the right incentives.
“An example of this is that I think a lot about how to reward effort, risk-taking and good execution, and not always results. It’s easy to think that you should reward results. But then people start playing, right? People take conservative things where you will get a good result.”
It harkens back to an earlier era when Google was more willing to take strange risks, pointing out in particular the company’s ill-fated Google Glass; It didn’t work, but it was one of the first devices to experiment with augmented reality.
“W.As we said recently, we went back to the notion that we had at the beginning of Google: Google Labs. And so we are creating something that will make it easier to publish something without always having to worry about the entire brand and the weight of creating a product of Google. How can you publish something easily and lightly? How can you allow people to create prototypes internally more easily and get them to you?”
Later, Levin asked what developments Pichai was most excited about this year.
First, he cited the multimodality of Google’s latest LLM, that is, its ability to process different types of input, such as video and text, simultaneously.
“All of our AI models already use Gemini 1.5 Pro; That’s a 1 million context window and it’s multimodal. The ability to process enormous amounts of information in any type of modality on the input side and deliver it on the output side, I think is mind-blowing in a way that we haven’t fully processed.”
Secondly, it highlighted the ability to connect different discrete responses to provide smarter workflows. “Nowadays LLMs are used simply as something to search for information, but Chaining them together in a way that can address workflows will be extraordinarily powerful. Maybe it could make the billing system at Stanford Hospital a little easier,” he joked.
Can watch the full interview, along with an interview with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell that took place earlier, on YouTube. Levin and Pichai start around 1 hour and 18 minutes.