Google CEO Sundar Pichai's Vision on AI

In an interview tied to the launch of Gemini, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai described the company's most capable AI model as natively multimodal from the ground up, built to process text, audio, images, and code at once.

He said Gemini Ultra reached state of the art results on 30 of the 32 leading benchmarks, excelling especially in multimodal tests.

Pichai highlighted that the model crossed the 90 percent threshold on the MMLU benchmark, becoming the first to do so after scores sat at 30 to 40 percent just two years earlier.

Gemini would reach users through Bard immediately and roll out across Google's products throughout 2024 in what he called one of the biggest upgrades yet.

He predicted AI would be one of the biggest things society grapples with over the next decade, bringing both surprising positive effects and real risks.

Pichai also acknowledged that hallucinations and data leakage remain unsolved research problems under current language model technology.

The 2023 pitch became an arms race with a price tag. At I/O on May 19, 2026 he put the Gemini app past 900 million monthly users and 2026 capital spending at $180 to $190 billion, up from $31 billion in 2022, per Google's keynote post. The bill for search dominance is also due in court: Judge Amit Mehta finalized data sharing remedies on December 5, 2025, and on July 28, 2026 the Justice Department filed a 144 page brief asking the D.C. Circuit to ban the $26 billion a year in default payments to Apple that Mehta left alone, Courthouse News reports. Google's reply brief is due September 29, with oral argument in the term that opens that month.