Highlights from Google & Alphabet CEO, Sundar Pichai’s Fireside Chat with H.E. Omar Al Olama
Dubai, UAE, February 14, 2025 – On Tuesday, Google & Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai joined H.E. Omar Al Olama, UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy, and Remote Work Applications, in a virtual fireside chat at the 2025 World Government Summit in Dubai. The discussion focused on the company’s AI-first approach and its long-term investments in foundational technologies like Quantum computing and Waymo.
Google is building applications that make AI truly helpful to people everywhere with seven products that reach more than 2 billion users — like Maps, Search and Android, are all powered by our AI innovations, and its most recent Gemini models. Excerpts from the fireside chat below.
- “Intelligence is going to be widely available. This technology is going to be at everyone’s fingertips, and it’s going to impact the world profoundly.”
- “The progress in Quantum is palpably exciting…In a 5 to 10 year time frame, I think you will see start practically useful quantum computers.”
- “Broadly, I think we are in the business of providing information to people…we are continuing to see strong growth in Search.”
- “I think it’s a combination of things. Our founders really set a very ambitious framework for the company…You have to have an optimistic culture, a culture of curiosity.”
- “In 2015, when I became CEO, I said the company is going to be AI first, and we decided to take a full-stack approach to AI. We started building our tensor processing units in 2017. When you make these long-term technology bets, AI, Waymo, Quantum, those you know, it will eventually happen. At that foundational layer, you take a long-term view and you don’t waver at all. At the application layer, you are right. When you take efforts to build products, you’re going to have some successes and some things won’t work out. There’s judgment there as to when you keep pushing through and at what point do you see it’s not getting traction, your approach is wrong, and you have to course correct. We don’t always get it right, but it’s important to go through that reading process too. That’s what keeps the company fresh, and you’re constantly pushing to do new things.”
- “At this moment, I’m spending a lot of my time on AI. The rate of progress, how profound the technology is…You’ve rarely seen a technology which is progressing so fast.”
Please find the full fireside chat transcript below (Q: H.E Omar Al Olama, A: Sundar Pichai):
Q: Sundar, can you see me?
A: Yes, your Excellency, good to see you again. Great to be here, and thanks for having me.
Q: Thank you so much for joining us. We would have loved to have you in person, but technology enables us to have this conversation wherever in the world you are. You recently made an AI investment in a big data center here in France. Congratulations!
A: Thank you very much. I’m in France right now, and I’m glad to be able to do this.
Q: We’re going to start first by talking about the great technologies that Google has been at the forefront of, then we’re going to talk about the company, the culture, and the lessons for governments, and then end with some personal questions about you. Looking forward to it?
A: Great, looking forward to it.
Q: For a long period of time, every single moment someone talks about a technology breakthrough, they would say we had an AlphaGo moment. Today, what’s top of mind for everyone is DeepSeek and the breakthrough that it created. What are your thoughts on what the breakthrough was, what the lessons learned were, and what we need to pay attention to as governments with regards to this announcement?
A: I think the DeepSeek team has done very, very good work. But for me, the lessons learned, stepping back, it shows how global this AI development is. It’s happening all around the world. It’s a moment of excitement and inflection everywhere. You can see there is Frontier Model development happening around the world. I think what caught people’s attention with DeepSeek was that you could have an efficient model, open source, and something everyone can immediately access. I think that creates a lot of excitement. But, you know, it’s something obviously we are focused on as well. We’ve always realized the models which you serve people around the world, it has to be very efficient. We’ve done that with Gemini Flash models. They are very, very efficient. Intelligence is going to be widely available. This technology is going to be at everyone’s fingertips, and it’s going to impact the world profoundly. I think the DeepSeek innovation reinforces that point.
Q: You had a similar moment a few months ago when you guys made an incredible breakthrough in Quantum technology and really showed the world that Quantum is actually closer today than it ever was. What should governments pay attention to there? Should we talk about regulating Quantum at this point? Is it something that’s going to come in the next year or five or 10? What excites you about this, and what should we be worried about?
A: The progress in Quantum is palpably exciting. We’ve been focused on it for a long time. I think we have the most advanced state-of-the-art effort anywhere in the world. The latest breakthrough we had, we were able to perform a computation in 5 minutes that would have taken one of the world’s fastest supercomputers over 10 septillion years. More importantly, it shows that we can tackle error correction in a way that we can build large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers. To me, the quantum moment reminds me of where AI was in the 2010s. In a 5 to 10 year time frame, I think you will start practically useful quantum computers. In terms of what governments can do, I think it’s too early to regulate the technology, but I think it’s important to come to a good understanding of it and then start preparing for it. The main first areas we would need to tackle are encryption. Beyond that, I would think about, no different from AI, how do you set up a quantum cluster to do some pioneering research work in the next 3 to 5 year time frame.
Q: It’ll take a normal computer multiple billion years to identify if the answer is correct. How do you know that the answer is correct? What if it just throws out a number that doesn’t make sense?
A: We do, the techniques we use have verification. There’s a way to verify that the answer is correct, which is different from how long it takes to compute an answer, and so those are the techniques we use to triangulate there.
Q: Let me maybe pivot a little bit about another venture that you guys are into. You are into AI heavily. Today, most people actually don’t recognize this, but around 8.5 billion searches are done a day. And you have around 49% of the internet traffic every single month coming to Google. There have been talks about people moving to ChatGPT or moving to other platforms for search. Do you see that affecting Google in any way, or is it so far that growth is exceeding any sort of decline from these platforms?
A: Broadly, I think we are in the business of providing information to people. People’s information needs are exploding. So it feels very far from a zero-sum construct to me. Having said that, we are continuing to see strong growth in search. We have recently evolved search pretty profoundly with AI overviews, and we have found that people are engaging with it more. It’s leading to a growth in search usage across all demographics. Taking the long-term view, I think AI is going to help expand the opportunity space not just for us but for others working there too. With the kind of agentic capabilities that it’ll have, you can not only ask questions, you can get things done. I think it can help you be much more productive across a range of domains. Given how big the landscape is, I definitely expect us to be a leading player, but it’s natural to me that there’ll be others doing well in the space as well. Just like the internet, there have been other companies. AI would be no different.
Q: When you actually look at Google, what we realize is that you have an AI layer that cuts across all of your different products. Let’s talk about self-driving cars for a second. Why aren’t we seeing more applications of Waymo across different countries? What can we do to ensure that we usher this future in closer rather than push it further out in the future?
A: I’ve been super excited about Waymo for a while, and I think we’re really hitting our stride in the past 12 months or so. We’ve obviously been very, very safety-focused. We want to build a very safe and reliable Waymo driver. We’ve definitely shown the progress there. Thanks to the work with AI we’ve done over the years, we now have over 33 million rider miles driven, and Waymo had 78% fewer injury-causing crashes compared to human drivers. Last year, Waymo served over 4 million passenger trips, and we are now averaging over 150,000 paid rides per week in the US across San Francisco, Phoenix, and LA. We are now expanding. We have a goal of doing this in 10 new cities in 2025. We’ll be doing our first international testing in Japan. We do want to work with other innovative countries. We are at an exciting juncture, and I think the technology is working. We have to scale it up by partnering with regulators and countries around the world.
Q: Let’s put the UAE on that list and on that roadmap.
A: Looking forward to it.
Q: Once we achieve certain technological advancements like self-driving cars, it creates new types of jobs, although yes, it does eliminate some jobs in the past. What kind of jobs are going to be created within the experience of someone getting into a self-driving car to arriving to their destination? Will we actually start creating these jobs that will make the commute more appealing for us? Do you think that new platforms are going to emerge from these kind of services? Do you have any ideas of what’s going to happen?
A: Maybe two observations. One is there was a recent study by MIT economist David Autor which said if you go back to 1940, since then, 60% of the new jobs that have been created kind of didn’t exist before that. Just imagine even 5 years after the internet started in the year 2000, envisioning that there could be someone called a YouTube creator. Today, there are millions of creators. We have to keep that potential in mind. To me, there is no doubt in the AI-driven world, just like the internet did, there’ll be many, many new opportunities created. I think over time, there’ll be value and a premium placed on human experiences and human interactions. We’ve seen that with chess. Chess is more popular than ever before. While the technology is going to be very prevalent, it’s going to improve productivity, it will cause disruption, but it’ll also create many, many new types of opportunities. When I look at our latest video creation models, it’s going to enable many, many more people to create content than ever before.
Q: Let’s pivot a little bit to the company. What makes the culture at Google so special? Is there a formula? Is there a thing that you do to inspire people? How does it work?
A: I think it’s a combination of things. Our founders really set a very ambitious framework for the company. We used to say we need to have a healthy disregard for the impossible. We always felt that if you encourage people to work on very ambitious things, even if you end up failing, well, there are many advantages to doing that. One, you have very little competition. Waymo or Quantum or AI are great examples. You attract the best people. Even if you end up not achieving that ambitious goal, whatever you end up doing will be very, very valuable. You have to have an optimistic culture, a culture of curiosity. You encourage optimism, you really push people to take risks, and you don’t punish failures. So it’s a combination of all that. We’ve always had to experiment. For example, just about 2 years ago, I set up a Labs group so that people can have small teams to go ship stuff, and out of which we shipped something like NotebookLM last year, which ended up being very, very popular. You have to constantly tinker and make sure you’re innovating from the ground up.
Q: So you approach things with the approach of a scientist. I saw how many projects Google killed, or let’s say stopped, over the last couple of years. It’s around 296 projects in total. What struck me is the fact that you’re still trying to innovate, you’re still trying to iterate. How do you identify when you continue a project and when you actually stop? What triggers you to say, okay, we’ve given that a go, we’re going to park it for now and we’re going to focus on something else?
A: There are two types of it. One is at a core technology layer, you’re making long-term bets. In 2015, when I became CEO, I said the company is going to be AI first, and we decided to take a full-stack approach to AI. We started building our tensor processing units in 2017. When you make these long-term technology bets, AI, Waymo, Quantum, those you know, it will eventually happen. At that foundational layer, you take a long-term view and you don’t waver at all. At the application layer, you are right. When you take efforts to build products, you’re going to have some successes and some things won’t work out. There’s judgment there as to when you keep pushing through and at what point do you see it’s not getting traction, your approach is wrong, and you have to course correct. We don’t always get it right, but it’s important to go through that reading process too. That’s what keeps the company fresh, and you’re constantly pushing to do new things.
Q: Do you tell people to use AI? Do you have any training programs for them to use generative AI? Is it something that you push for, or is it something that you’re waiting just to see how it’s going to affect the employees and the culture in Google?
A: No, look, we at this is internally at Google, this concept of dogfooding, you eat your own dog food, is what we call it. We really want people to adopt our technologies and be at the cutting edge. There are two examples I would say. One is we are really trying to help engineers code using AI. Already, we’ve made deep progress on having AI tools give people suggestions that can complete as they’re writing lines of code. In fact, 25% of all code being written now has those suggestions from AI which are accepted by engineers. Now we have smaller projects which is pushing it to the next level, like how can they give the AI agents tasks and that can go and actually do much deeper work for them? The second is we’re taking many, many functions and business processes across Google and trying to think how we can make them more productive using AI in a deep way. How can we do customer service in an end-to-end way that is better? To answer your question, yes, we deeply encourage people to use AI, and we measure it, we track it, and when we find solutions that work, we bring it to our cloud partners as solutions for them to try in their companies.
Q: I’d like to pivot now maybe to more questions about your journey, personal questions if you don’t mind. Why do you think you made it? What was the secret that got Sundar to start in a new village in India and end up leading one of the world’s largest companies?
A: I’d have to reflect on it. I think for me, I was fortunate in some way. I had to wait a long time to get access to technology, so growing up, every moment was very, very vivid for me. I saw firsthand how it changed my life and the lives of people around me. I had this passion to kind of get access to technology and to make sure I was working on things that would bring technology to as many people as possible. Maybe in some ways, I had a personal mission. I was fortunate to find a company like Google. When I read Google’s mission statement in which it said it wanted to make information universally accessible, that’s what really excited me to come to Google. Part of it is being, you need to get excited by a mission. Beyond that, I would say challenging yourself to work with people who are better than you. You learn and grow when you’re pushing yourself to be with people who you think are better than you in many, many ways. I’ve strived to do that over the years. I would encourage everyone, each person, the path is different, but if you can find something you know that resonates with you in a deeper way to your heart, I think that brings out the best work you can do.
Q: What are you most obsessed about?
A: At this moment, I’m spending a lot of my time on AI. The rate of progress, how profound the technology is, it’s the first time I felt even if I travel for a couple of weeks outside and I come back to the company, I go back to the teams working on AI to catch up on the progress that has just happened in the last two weeks. You’ve rarely seen a technology which is progressing so fast. Obsessing about making sure we are driving the technology forward, making sure we are building applications around it, and that we are doing it responsibly. We want to be bold with this moment in time, innovate, but the technology obviously needs to be deployed responsibly.
Q: Any fears that you have for what AI can do that we’re not paying attention to? What do you fear most when it comes to AI? What’s something that you know as government officials we need to pay attention to?
A: As governments, you want to focus on the AI opportunity. The UAE has been very farsighted. There’s going to be no technology which would impact your economy as much as AI. Make sure you’re investing in your country’s infrastructure, skilling your population, unlocking data in the public sector, and using that data to come up with solutions using AI. On the risk side, all of us need to be responsible with this technology. It’s a very powerful technology, it can be a self-improving technology. Making sure you’re developing competency to evaluate risk, assess risks, and take the appropriate steps over time is going to be something we all need to invest in. There have to be global standards around it.
Q: What can we do about deep fakes?
A: We are definitely developing technology, we call it SynthID, and so we are watermarking image generation and we are also open sourcing the tools to detect it. We need to work with other companies to create a standard around it. Over time, we want to encourage AI innovation, but there’ll be areas where regulation makes sense.
Q: Let’s assume that you woke up tomorrow in my body and you were the Minister of AI. What decisions would you take that are currently not being thought of, that you think will have the biggest value for a company like the UAE or any country in the world?
A: I would reemphasize the four areas I would focus on: supporting infrastructure, skilling, unlocking data, and balanced regulation. I think most people are underestimating the infrastructure transition. Skilling is another important area. I think the amount of work that needs to be done to help your population get ready and transition is something there needs to be a lot of effort put into it. I think the much tougher challenge has been encouraging governments to unlock data. Being at the forefront of that is a real opportunity. Then finally, how do you have balanced regulation? All of that needs to be in the toolkit. Above all, I would say being excited at this moment, embracing innovation because it is something that’s coming at us in a fast way, is going to be very, very important.
Q: Thank you very much for your time. That was great, and thank you for taking all the questions. I wish you the best of luck in France, and hopefully we’ll see you here next year.
ENDS
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