Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s plan to make Gemini the only AI that matters

Sundar Pichai was blindsided by ChatGPT. Soon after being named Google CEO in 2015, he’d declared that the world was entering an AI-first era. He went on to bet his stewardship of the entire company on his belief that the technology would be “an intelligent assistant helping you throughout your day,” as he put it in his first shareholder letter. Yet his prescience hadn’t prevented OpenAI from swooping in on November 30, 2022, with the first product that truly demonstrated the epoch-shifting power of generative AI, a breakthrough that had emerged from Google’s research labs in the first place. Pichai remembers his instinctive response to ChatGPT: “Wow, this technology is going to diffuse earlier and faster than we were expecting.” The feeling, he says, was “uncomfortably exciting.” He knew that if AI was entering hyperdrive ahead of schedule, Google would have to scramble. Pichai is sharing this memory in a conference room at Google’s expansive office at Manhattan’s Pier 57, a former st