‘Dance to own music, micro-focus small in context,’ says Sundar Pichai as big tech’s AI race heats up

Satya Nadella-led Microsoft Corporation has become Sundar Pichai-led Alphabet’s primary competitor in the fast-paced artificial intelligence (AI) technology landscape.

With heavy investments in companies such as OpenAI, Inflection, and Mistral AI, Microsoft is edging close to Alphabet in the AI tech race, particularly its application in the search tool — a space heavily dominated by Google, as per a Bloomberg report.

Notably, the Microsoft chief took jabs at and even voiced strong statements against Google at a US anti-trust trial in October last year. He said Google holds exclusive, multibillion-dollar agreements with tech giants, such as Apple Inc., which allows it to be the default search engine on smartphones and browsers.

Competition Heats Up

But Pichai seems unfazed. "I'm trying to keep focused and not play to someone else’s dance music. People tend to focus on this micro-moment, but it is so small in the context of what’s ahead. When I look at the opportunities ahead, across everything we do, I put a lot of chips, at least from my perspective, on Google," he told Bloomberg.

Earlier, Nadella also argued that Google's exclusivity contracts had disadvantaged his company's Bing search engine, as Google's default status drives increased user activity on its search engine, and this, in turn, fuels better search results.

During the launch of the AI-boosted Bing search engine, Nadella said they "brought some more competition" to the space, adding that Google is "the 800-pound gorilla" in this race, as per a Hindustan Times report.

“We competed today. Today was a day where we brought some more competition to search. Believe me, I’ve been at it for 20 years, and I’ve been waiting for it. At the end of the day, they’re the 800-pound gorilla in this. That is what they are. And 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, and I think that’ll be a great day," he added.

Pichai Outlines AI Roadmap

Highlighting the company's focus on AI since 2016, Pichai acknowledged that Google faced challenges in capitalising on the chatbot trend and its late entry into the domain. But he remains optimistic, the report said.

Drawing parallels with past innovations such as search engines and browsers, Pichai sees AI as in its infancy stage. “We weren’t the first company to do search. We weren’t the first company to do email. We weren’t the first company to build a browser. So I view this AI as we are in the earliest possible stages," he told Bloomberg.

On Google's recent unveiling of its Gemini image generator, encountering criticism due to unintended biases in generated images, Pichai admitted the misstep. “We got it wrong. From the ground up, we are retraining these models just to make sure we are also making the product better. As soon as it’s ready, we will get it out to people," he said, adding that he expects the feature to be re-released in a few weeks.

Despite the challenges, Pichai doesn't show his worries, if any, the report added. “People are trying to solve problems in their day-to-day lives. A lot of our products integrate in a way that provides value for our users. The way Google is approaching AI drives innovation and adds choice in the market. That’s how I think about it," he said.

On the proliferation of AI-generated content online, Pichai said the ability to distinguish between synthetic and authentic content would be a part of what "defines search in the next decade ahead.”

(With inputs from Bloomberg)