Google CEO fires one off at Microsoft by saying its ready for the AI race 'any day, any time'

Google's CEO Sundar Pichai has weighed in on the recent conversation surrounding AI and its development - Are leading AI companies struggling to scale AI models due to a lack of high-quality training data?

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai

Reports indicate that top AI development companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google will soon hit a wall that will hinder the explosive performance jumps of AI models such as OpenAI's GPT, or Google's Gemini. However, according to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, these assumptions about AI model scaling are unfounded, saying, "There's no evidence that the scaling laws have begun to stop. They will eventually stop, but we're not there yet."

These assertions that AI models will still continue to develop rapidly in the immediate future were subtly reiterated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who wrote on X, "There's no wall". Current Google CEO Sundar Pichai joined in on the conversation at The New York Times' Dealbook summit, where he said, "I think the progress is going to get harder when I look at '25. The low-hanging fruit is gone. The hill is steeper." Pichai recognized there will be challenges ahead that simply can't be solved by throwing more compute at the AI model.

"When you start out quickly scaling up, you can throw more compute and you can make a lot of progress, but you definitely are going to need deeper breakthroughs as we go to the next stage," Pichai said at the Dealbook Summit. "So you can perceive it as there's a wall, or there's some small barriers. I don't subscribe to the wall notion."

Additionally, Pichai fired one off at Microsoft, saying he would love to do a side-by-side comparison between Microsoft's own AI models, and Google's. Pichai was poking fun at Microsoft's deep multi-billion investment into OpenAI, which gives the company access to OpenAI's latest GPT models that are then used to power Microsoft's recently released Copilot app.

"I would love to do a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft's own models and our models any day, any time," Pichai quipped. "They're using someone else's models."