Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Gemini and the coming age of AI | MIT Technology Review

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Google released the first phase of its next-generation AI model, Gemini, today. Gemini reflects years of efforts from inside Google, overseen and driven by its CEO, Sundar Pichai.

( _You can read all about Gemini in our report from Melissa Heikkilä and Will Douglas Heaven_ [_here_](https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/06/1084471/google-deepminds-new-gemini-model-looks-amazing-but-could-signal-peak-ai-hype/).)

Pichai, who previously oversaw Chrome and Android, is famously product obsessed. In his first [founder’s letter](https://blog.google/alphabet/this-years-founders-letter/) as CEO in 2016, he predicted that “\[w\]e will move from mobile first to an AI first world.” In the years since, Pichai has infused AI deeply into all of Google’s products, from Android devices all the way up to the cloud.

Despite that, the last year has largely been defined by the AI releases from another company, OpenAI. The rollout of DALL-E and GPT-3.5 last year, followed by GPT-4 this year, dominated the sector and kicked off an arms race between startups and tech giants alike.

Gemini is now the latest effort in that race. This state-of-the-art system was led by Google DeepMind, the newly integrated organization led by Demis Hassabis that brings together the company’s AI teams under one umbrella. You can experience Gemini in Bard today, and it will become integrated across the company’s line of products throughout 2024.

We sat down with Sundar Pichai at Google’s offices in Mountain View, California, on the eve of Gemini’s launch to discuss what it will mean for Google, its products, AI, and society writ large.

The following transcript represents Pichai in his own words. The conversation has been edited for clarity and readability.

**MIT Technology Review:** **Why is Gemini exciting? Can you tell me what’s the big picture that you see as it relates to AI, its power, its usefulness, the direction as it goes into all of your products?**

Sundar Pichai: A specific part of what makes it exciting is it’s a natively multimodal model from the ground up. Just like humans, it’s not just learning on text alone. It’s text, audio, code. So the model is innately more capable because of that, and I think will help us tease out newer capabilities and contribute to the progress of the field. That’s exciting.

It’s also exciting because Gemini Ultra is state of the art in 30 of the 32 leading benchmarks, and particularly in the multimodal benchmarks. That [MMMU benchmark](https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.16502)—it shows the progress there. I personally find it exciting that in MMLU \[massive multi-task language understanding\], which has been one of the leading benchmarks, it crossed the 90% threshold, which is a big milestone. The state of the art two years ago was  30, or 40%. So just think about how much the field is progressing. Approximate

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