Sundar Pichai

Sundar Pichai (born 1972) is the CEO of Google and its parent Alphabet. Raised in Madurai, India, in a home without a telephone for much of his childhood, he came to the US on a scholarship to Stanford, joined Google in 2004, and rose by shipping unglamorous, enormous things — the Google Toolbar, then Chrome. He became Google CEO in 2015 and Alphabet CEO in 2019.

“AI-first,” before it was obvious

Pichai declared Google an “AI-first” company in 2016, and at a January 2018 town hall made the comparison that has followed him since: AI is more profound than electricity or fire. Google had the research pedigree to back it — its scientists invented the transformer architecture in 2017, the “T” in ChatGPT. Yet when OpenAI shipped ChatGPT in late 2022, Google was widely reported to have declared an internal “code red,” and its rushed Bard demo in February 2023 wiped $100 billion off Alphabet’s value in a day.

The comeback vindicated the thesis. Pichai merged Google Brain and DeepMind under Demis Hassabis, and the resulting Gemini models returned Google to the frontier while AI Overviews rewired Search itself. Repeating his fire-and-electricity line on 60 Minutes in 2023, he added a characteristic hedge: society, he warned, may not be prepared for how fast AI will move. Critics call him cautious to a fault and note the tension between AI answers and the ad-funded web Google built; Pichai’s wager is that the profound technology and the profitable one can remain the same thing.