New Delhi, Sep 30 (IANS) For Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the next 25 years are crucial as with artificial intelligence (AI), the company has the opportunity to do things that matter on an even larger scale.

As Google looks ahead, the Indian-origin tech mogul has been reflecting on the commitment from the original founder’s letter in 2004: “to develop services that improve the lives of as many people as possible — to do things that matter.”

“We’re just beginning to see what the next wave of technology is capable of and how quickly it can improve,“ according to Pichai.

Today, one million people are using generative AI in the Google Workspace to write and create.

Flood forecasting now covers places where more than 460 million people live. A million researchers have used the AlphaFold database which covers 200 million predictions of protein structures, helping with advances to cut plastic pollution, tackle antibiotic resistance, fight malaria, and more.

“We’ve demonstrated how AI can help the airline industry to decrease contrails from planes, an important tool for fighting climate change,” he said in a detailed post on the “quarter century of change”.

Still, there is so much more ahead.

Over time, AI will be the biggest technological shift we see in our lifetimes. It’s bigger than the shift from desktop computing to mobile, and it may be bigger than the internet itself. It’s a fundamental rewiring of technology and an incredible accelerant of human ingenuity.

“Making AI more helpful for everyone, and deploying it responsibly, is the most important way we’ll deliver on our mission for the next 10 years and beyond,” Pichai noted.

“Our search for answers will drive extraordinary technology progress over the next 25 years. And in 2048, if, somewhere in the world, a teenager looks at all we’ve built with AI and shrugs, we’ll know we succeeded. And then we’ll get back to work,” he emphasised.

An essential truth of innovation is that the moment one pushes the boundary of a technology, it soon goes from extraordinary to ordinary.

“That’s why Google has never taken our success for granted,” according to Pichai.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the CEO and president of Google's parent company, Alphabet, respectively, first wrote down the mission 25 years ago -- to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

“They had an ambitious vision for a new kind of search engine to help people make sense of the waves of information moving online. The product they built, Google Search, went on to help billions of people around the world get answers to their questions,” said Pichai.

The questions Pichai asked Google have evolved over time: “How do you fix a dripping faucet?” “Fastest route to Stanford Hospital?” “Ways to calm a crying baby?” And right around spring of 2003, perhaps: “How to ace a Google interview?” And over time, Google got much better at answering them.

Search also laid the foundations for Google to make an economic impact beyond its own walls.

“Search is still at the core of our mission, and it’s still our biggest moonshot with so much more to do. Of course, Google today is more than a search box. We have 15 Google products that each serve more than half a billion people and businesses, and six that serve more than 2 billion users each,” Pichai noted.

Like most Google searches, all those products started with a question, too.

With Gmail, it was -- could we offer 1GB of storage to every person? In 2004, when Gmail launched, that volume of storage was over 100X what most other free webmail services were offering!

“Then a few years later, we saw an opportunity to dramatically improve web browsers — and in turn the web — for people everywhere. So with Chrome we asked: Could we build a browser that made the web better, with simplicity, speed, and security at its core? Right before launch, I had my own question: Will people use this?”

The questions have kept coming, and Google kept improving and expanding its products with new answers.

Designing products that help people at scale is both a privilege and a responsibility.

People have their own questions: Can we trust these new technologies?

“We think deeply about how to build responsible technology from the start, whether it’s making sure everyone’s information is protected and secure, or keeping people safe from bad actors online,” the Alphabet CEO said.

Washington, June 24 (IANS) Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has announced the company will open its global fintech operation centre at GIFT City in Gujarat.

After meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi here on Friday during his three-day state visit to the US, Pichai made the announcement, saying that the company will continue to invest in India through its $10 billion digitisation fund.

In 2020, Google had announced to invest a whopping $10 billion in the country through its India Digitisation Fund over the next five to seven years.

"Today we are announcing the opening of our global fintech operations centre in GIFT City, Gujarat. It will cement India's fintech leadership, thanks to UPI, and Aadhaar. We are going to build on that foundation and take it globally," Pichai said.

He said Prime Minister Modi's vision for Digital India was ahead of its time and "I now see it as a blueprint that other countries are looking to do so".

The Ministry of External Affairs said in a tweet that Modi interacted with Pichai and "discussed measures like artificial intelligence, fintech and promoting research and development".

They also discussed collaboration between Google and academic institutions in India to promote research and development, and skill development.

In December last year, Pichai visited India and pledged support for India's G20 Presidency.

"Look forward to continuing our strong partnership and supporting India's G20 Presidency to advance an open, connected internet that works for all," Pichai had tweeted after meeting Prime Minister Modi in New Delhi.

Praising the government's Digital India initiative, Pichai said that he is "excited for India to share its experience with the world as it takes over the G20 Presidency in 2023".

He added that the pace of technological change in India is "extraordinary" and there are several opportunities ahead.

New Delhi, April 26 (IANS) Facing a tough competition from AI-powered Microsoft Bing, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has announced to unlock the full potential of AI into its Search engine.

Pichai said the company will unlock "entirely new experiences in Search and beyond" just as camera, voice and translation technologies have all opened entirely new categories of queries and exploration.

"For years, we've been focused on making Search even more helpful, from Google Lens to multi-Search to visual exploration in Search, immersive view in Maps, Google Translate, to all the language models powering Search today, we have used AI to open up access to knowledge in powerful ways," Pichai told analysts during the company's March quarter earnings call.

He said that guided by data and years of experience about what people want, the company will test and iterate "as we go because we know that billions of people trust Google to provide the right information".

In March, Google introduced an experimental conversational AI service called Bard.

It has since added its PaLM (Pathways Language) model to make it even more powerful and Bard can now help people with programming and software development tasks, including code generation, and lots more to come, informed Pichai.

For developers, the company has released PaLM API alongside its new MakerSuite tool.

"We are proud to have world-class research teams who have been advancing the breakthroughs underpinning this new era of AI. Last week, I announced that we are bringing together the Brain Team in Google Research and DeepMind into one unit," the Google CEO informed.