Sundar Pichai
Illustration by Andre Gottschalk
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Alphabet
CEO Sundar Pichai, 51, has played a pivotal role in winning back the narrative over the company’s leadership in artificial intelligence.
Pichai joined Google in 2004, leading the development of the Chrome web browser before running product and engineering. He was named CEO of Google in 2015 and shifted the company’s strategy to focus on AI a year later. In 2019, he became CEO of Google parent Alphabet.
Earlier this year, investors grew worried that Google’s search engine could be disrupted by the latest wave of generative-AI chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Alphabet’s shares dropped significantly after
Microsoft
announced that its Bing search engine would add chatbot capabilities.
But the reality is that Google’s products had market-leading AI capabilities for years under Pichai’s direction. Any concerns about falling behind in AI faded after Alphabet executives unveiled a flurry of coming AI-driven features for Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Search at the company’s annual developer conference last month. Google also announced rapid progress for its Bard chatbot and revealed its latest advanced AI model, PaLM 2.
The announcements demonstrated that Alphabet is thriving and making rapid progress in infusing nearly all of its services with the latest generative-AI technologies. As for search-engine worries, according to Statcounter, Google now has 93% of the search-engine market, slightly increasing its market share since the competing chatbots were launched.
Write to Tae Kim at [email protected]
Source: https://www.barrons.com/articles/alphabet-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-leader-7b399a65?siteid=yhoof2&yptr=yahoo