Alphabet to keep hiring engineers while AI advances

Speaking at the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, CEO Sundar Pichai said he will continue to invest in engineering in the near future.

Alphabet Inc.’s Sundar Pichai said his company will keep expanding its engineering ranks at least into 2026, stressing human talent remains key even as Google’s parent ramps up AI investments.

Speaking at the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, Pichai said he will continue to invest in engineering in the near future.

US tech leaders like Microsoft Corp. have trimmed more staff this year, reflecting in part the enormous investments needed to ensure leadership in AI. The firings have stoked fears about the technology replacing certain job functions. Google itself has conducted rounds of layoffs in recent years to free up resources.

“I expect we will grow from our current engineering base even into next year, because it allows us to do more with the opportunity space,” Pichai said in conversation with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang. “I just view this as making engineers dramatically more productive, getting a lot of the mundane aspects out of what they do.”

Still, Pichai presented a vision of AI that was at once optimistic about the technology’s possibilities and sober-minded about some of its present limitations. While AI excels in areas like coding, the models continue to make basic mistakes, Pichai said.

“So are we currently on an absolute path to AGI? I don’t think anyone can say for sure,” Pichai said. He was referring to artificial general intelligence: the dream of building AI that can perform on par with humans.

As Google incorporates more AI into its search engine, publishers have sounded the alarm about how the company’s AI-generated answers deprive them of traffic. Pichai stressed that the company remains committed to sending traffic to the web.

“Compared to most companies in the world, we take care to design an experience which is going to showcase links,” Pichai said. “We took a long time testing AI Overviews and prioritized approaches which resulted in high quality traffic out. I’m confident that many years from now that’s how Google will work.”

Pichai has led Google since 2015, when he took the reins from Google co-founder Larry Page pledging to focus even more on AI.

Asked about what qualities the public can expect to see in the company’s next CEO, Pichai quipped: “Whoever is running it will have an extraordinary AI companion.”

At the same conference on Wednesday, Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said that there’s been a cultural shift in the Silicon Valley and it is now more palatable for the tech industry to support the US military’s efforts.

The company announced a partnership with defense contractor Anduril Industries Inc. last week to develop products for the US military, including an artificial intelligence-powered helmet with virtual and augmented reality features.

Anduril’s co-founder Trae Stephens and other industry leaders such as Perplexity AI Inc. Chief Executive Officer Aravind Srinivas will join the Bloomberg Tech summit on Thursday.