Sundar Pichai on start-ups: ‘Always susceptible to someone in a garage…’

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been best known for his innovative method in driving the big-tech company through the years. In a recent interview at Stanford, Sundar Pichai said that start-ups trying to upend Google businesses have been a constant concern for him. “It’s a question which has always kept me up at night through the years. You’re always susceptible to someone in a garage with a better idea.” Pichai said. 

At Stanford, Sundar Pichai also talked about the importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the transformative qualities of the same. 

How Sundar Pichai leads Google?

Sundar Pichai during his talks advocated against ‘rewarding every outcome’ of his employees. Pichai said that maintaining an entrepreneurial mindset in a company of over 180,000 employees is an uphill task.  The Google CEO emphasised that there is need for encouraging risk-taking initiatives, and reward effort among employees. 

Explaining his take on rewarding employees, Sundar Pichai said that employees would resort to conservative methods if reward was the end result of every outcome. In order to foster a risk-taking attitude among his employees, Pichai emphasises that every outcome need not be rewarded. 

“It’s easy to think you should reward outcomes. But then people start gaming it, right? People take conservative things in which you will get a good outcome.” Pichai said. 

Sundar Pichai on Google Glass

Pointing to Google Glass as an example of the company’s willingness to experiment, he said, “We recently said, we went back to a notion we had in early Google of Google Labs…How can you put out something in the easy way, the lighter weight way? How do you allow people to prototype more easily internally and get it out to people?”

Sundar Pichai on Gemini

Sundar Pichai said that he is very excited about the multimodal nature of Google’s large language model Gemini. He said, “The ability to process huge amounts of information in any type of modality on the input side and give it on the output side, I think it’s mind blowing.”

Pichai added, “Where today you’re using the LLMs as just an information-seeking thing, but chaining them together in a way that you can kind of tackle workflows, that’s going to be extraordinarily powerful.”

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Published: 12 Apr 2024, 02:54 PM IST