Google CEO Sundar Pichai and his executive team held a strategy meeting with employees last week to discuss the outlook for 2025 and what Google needs to focus on to get there. As you might imagine, a lot of it was about AI and shipping better, faster, more consumer-focused AI products.
This was highlighted in a CNBC article in which Google CEO Pichai tells employees to prepare for a big year in 2025, saying “the stakes are high.”
Gemini is consumer-oriented. “Gemini’s expansion on the consumer side will be our biggest focus next year,” Pichai was quoted as saying. The problem is that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is quickly becoming the brand for AI, much like Google is the brand for search. The CNBC article says:
One of the comments Pichai read out suggested that ChatGPT is “becoming as synonymous with AI as Google search,” and asked, “What are your plans to compete with this next year? ” he asked. Or are they less focused on consumer LLMs?”
Pichai wants that to happen to Google, not OpenAI. It’s unclear whether it will be built into Google Search, or whether it will be built into Search’s new AI mode or something else.
Comparison of OpenAI and Google. Pichai also showed a diagram of the large-scale language model that Gemini 1.5 leads over OpenAI’s GPT and other competitors. But that lead may not be sustained, and Google may have to play catch-up, he suggested. By 2025, “we can expect it to be a little bit more or less,” Pichai said. “I think we’re going to be cutting edge.”
“You don’t always have to be first in history, but you have to execute well and really be best-in-class as a product,” he said. “I think that’s 2025.”
Build and ship faster. Pichai also emphasized that the company needs to go back to its early roots and build and ship faster while also becoming more scrappy. Throughout the meeting, Pichai continued to remind employees of the need to “remain serious.”
“If you look at how the founders built our data centers in the early Google days, they were really, really deliberate in every decision they made,” Pichai said. “Constraints often lead to creativity. Not all problems are always solved by headcount.”
This will allow Google to compete in this space.
“I think 2025 is going to be a critical year,” Pichai said. “I think it’s really important to recognize the urgency of this moment, and we need to act faster as a company. The stakes are high. These are disruptive moments. In 2025, we… We need to be relentlessly focused on maximizing the benefits of this technology and solving real problems for our users.”
why do we care? 2025 will be a big year for AI, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and other AI startups. For these companies, this year will be critical in gaining market share and brand recognition in this space.
It will also be an exciting year as these AI technologies should bring about fundamental changes in consumer behavior.
