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Sundar Pichai on the challenge of innovating in a huge company and what he’s excited about this year

It was a notable appearance because Pichai's been having a bit of a rough go lately. Google is widely perceived to have gotten a late start on generative AI.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage on Wednesday at a Stanford event held by the university’s business school, offering some small insights into how he thinks about running one of the world’s most valuable tech companies. More recently, Alphabet’s Gemini LLM was excoriated for generating bizarrely inaccurate images of historical situations, such as depicting America’s founding fathers as Black or Native American, rather than white English men, suggesting an overcorrection for certain types of bias. The interviewer, Stanford Graduate School of Business Dean Jonathan Levin, wasn’t exactly a hostile inquisitor — at the end, he revealed that the two men’s sons had once played in a middle school band together — and Pichai is deft at answering difficult questions by posing them as further questions about how he thinks, rather than with direct answers.

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