Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, and its executive team held a strategy meeting with employees last week on its 2025 outlook and what Google needs to focus on to get there. As you can imagine, much of it was around AI and shipping AI products that are better, faster and more consumer focused.
This was covered in CNBC’s write up named Google CEO Pichai tells employees to gear up for big 2025: ‘The stakes are high’.
Consumer focused Gemini. “Scaling Gemini on the consumer side will be our biggest focus next year,” Pichai was quoted as saying. The issue is, ChatGPT from OpenAI is quickly becoming the brand for AI, like Google is for Search. The CNBC article reads:
One comment read aloud by Pichai suggested that ChatGPT “is becoming synonymous to AI the same way Google is to search,” with the questioner asking, “What’s our plan to combat this in the upcoming year? Or are we not focusing as much on consumer facing LLM?”
Pichai wants Google to be that, not OpenAI. Will that be baked into Google Search or a new AI mode in Search or something else, it is not clear.
Comparing OpenAI to Google. Pichai also showed a chart of large language models, with Gemini 1.5 leading OpenAI’s GPT and other competitors. But that lead might not stay and that Google may have to play catchup, he suggested. “I expect some back and forth” in 2025, Pichai said. “I think we’ll be state of the art.”
“In history, you don’t always need to be first but you have to execute well and really be the best in class as a product,” he said. “I think that’s what 2025 is all about.”