December 6, 2024 – At the New York Times DealBook Summit on Thursday, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, hinted at significant changes coming to the company’s search engine in 2025. Pichai suggested that users will be able to solve “more complex” problems than ever before.
“I think even by early 2025, you’ll be surprised by what the search engine will be able to do. It’s going to be a big leap from what it can do today,” Pichai stated.
Responding to comments made by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella earlier this year, where Nadella positioned Google as the “default winner” in the race of artificial intelligence, Pichai expressed his willingness to compare Microsoft’s models with Google’s. He added a subtle nod to Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, noting that they “are using someone else’s model.”
“As I look ahead, we are at the very beginning of a profound transformation,” Pichai said. “I believe there will be a tremendous amount of innovation ahead. We are committed to being at the forefront of this, and I think we are.”
Pichai revealed that Google is gearing up to launch its next-generation model but anticipates that progress in the coming year will be more challenging. “I think as we look to 2025, the progress will get harder. A lot of the easy work has been done, but the challenges ahead are more complex,” he explained.
Amidst industry debates on whether AI has reached a “bottleneck,” Pichai expressed partial disagreement. “When you start scaling things up, you can throw more compute at it and make a lot of progress, but as we enter the next phase, we will need deeper technical breakthroughs. You can think of it as walls or just small hurdles,” he said.
This year, Google has embarked on significant AI-driven enhancements to its search engine, including AI-powered search summaries and Lens updates that allow users to search the web using videos. Additionally, the company is preparing to roll out a major update to its Gemini model, positioning itself to compete with Microsoft, OpenAI, and the AI search engine Perplexity.
