- Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during a recent All-In podcast episode he sees all of the major tech companies doing well in the AI race, and that there won’t be one clear winner. There are still more companies to be launched that we don’t know about yet—which will create even more competition.
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly sophisticated and useful, tech giants are pouring much of their research and development dollars into the technology, with much discussion given to picking the winner of “the AI race.”
But that’s not how Google CEO Sundar Pichai sees it.
“I think all of us are going to do well in this scenario,” Pichai said during an episode of podcast All-In published Friday.
Podcast host David Friedberg had asked for Pichai’s perspective on his four biggest competitors: Sam Altman with OpenAI, Elon Musk with xAI, Mark Zuckerberg with Meta, and Satya Nadella with Microsoft. Pichai said it was a “very impressive group” with “some of the best companies [and] best entrepreneurs. These are phenomenal people. I respect all of them.”
Pichai said he had spent time with Musk a couple of weeks ago to talk to him about his “ability to build future technologies into existence,” adding, “I think it’s just unparalleled.”
Friedberg said everyone out there thinks “there’s a winner and everyone else is a loser.”
“But this is an entirely new world that’s going to be a lot bigger than the world we had last year,” Friedberg said. “And everyone’s building down their own path.”
Google didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s request for additional comment.
The Google CEO also said he’s “fortunate to know all of them,” and that “only one of them has invited me to a dance.”
Pichai was referencing a comment from Nadella in 2023. “At the end of the day, [Google is] the 800-pound gorilla in this,” Nadella told The Verge. “I hope that, with our innovation, they will definitely want to come out and show that they can dance. And I want people to know that we made them dance.”
Google launched Gemini in late 2023, the same year Microsoft introduced Copilot. Recently, Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said he’s trying to win over Gen Z users (who currently favor Apple and Google) by making the company’s AI more emotionally intelligent.
Also because AI is a relatively nascent technology, it is likely to face even more competition in the future, Pichai said. He noted that Google wasn’t even around yet when the internet was launched in 1983. The dominant search engine didn’t pop up until 1998.
“There are companies that haven’t been started yet [that] might be extraordinarily big winners in the AI thing,” Pichai said. AI is going to be a much “bigger opportunity landscape than all the previous technologies we have known combined.”
Still, Google continues betting big on AI. During a February earnings call, Alphabet CFO Anat Ashkenazi said as Alphabet expands its AI efforts, the company expects to put $75 billion toward capital expenditures this year, primarily for servers, data centers and networking. That was far more than analysts had been expecting at $58 billion.
Plus, Google plans to use its own AI tools to run its business by using it to write code or “even running some of our key processes,” Ashkenazi said during the earnings call.
But AI implementation takes time.
“We’re going to continue to focus on that so that we can support the growth in other areas,” Ashkenazi said. “[It’s] not a one-quarter type of effort.”
