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 now outruns the cash Google generates. In the second quarter of 2026 it spent $44.9 billion on AI infrastructure against $39.1 billion of operating cash flow, its first negative free cash flow since going public, and lifted its 2026 spending plan to as much as $205 billion, Ars Technica reported. Publishers losing traffic to its AI answers found no relief in court: Judge Amit Mehta dismissed antitrust suits by Chegg and Penske Media, writing that "an expectation is not an agreement," Ars Technica reported October 1. Google expects spending to climb again next year; its next quarterly report shows whether cash flow catches up.