Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, reportedly held a meeting for its employees where he spoke about the upcoming challenges in 2025 and how important it is for Google to ship AI products fast. One line that really stood out for me is "Scaling Gemini on the consumer side will be our biggest focus next year," Pichai later added.
There is no doubt that looking at the end of 2024, that Google's AI teams are moving incredibly fast. They are shipping products and updates incredibly fast compared to the year before. They are also doing so with a lot of PR buzz. That being said, Sundar Pichai makes it sound like they need to do more, better and faster.
“I think 2025 will be critical,” Pichai said. “I think it’s really important we internalize the urgency of this moment, and need to move faster as a company. The stakes are high. These are disruptive moments. In 2025, we need to be relentlessly focused on unlocking the benefits of this technology and solve real user problems.”
“It’s not lost on me that we are facing scrutiny across the world,” Pichai said. “It comes with our size and success. It’s part of a broader trend where tech is now impacting society at scale. So more than ever, through this moment, we have to make sure we don’t get distracted.”
Pichai said “building big, new business” is a top priority. “With the Gemini app, there is strong momentum, particularly over the last few months,” Pichai said. “But we have some work to do in 2025 to close the gap and establish a leadership position there as well.” “Scaling Gemini on the consumer side will be our biggest focus next year,” Pichai later added.
Then Pichai reportedly compared where Gemini is to OpenAI's models and said “I expect some back and forth” in 2025. “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.”
The issue is branding. While Google is known as Search, OpenAI is becoming known for AI and Google wants that as well. 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?”
Should be exciting to see what new fun tools we will have to play with this year then.
— Paul (Aoaku) (@Aoakudotcom) December 28, 2024
