The rapid advancement of AI is truly incredible. With breakthrough after breakthrough and milestone after milestone, there's no telling what will come next or what it will be capable of.
From mere text-generating chatbot to mage synthesis, to real-world applications like autonomous driving, medical diagnostics, and robotics, science-fiction has never been so real.
Google, the tech giant the internet is known for having, has been quick to predict how disruptive generative AIs like ChatGPT can be, especially when it can affect its vast empire of businesses and ventures. It was a "code red" and that its founders were summoned back to the office.
Sundar Pichai was right, and this is why Bard was born, and was later rebranded and relaunched as Gemini.
But since pretty much all major tech companies are pursuing a common goal, things are going to be a lot more difficult.
Speaking to Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times' DealBook summit, Pichai said Google was preparing to launch its next generation of models, but said he also expects progress in 2025 to slow down.
"The hill is steeper."
The high-ranking executive at Alphabet and Google doesn’t attribute the slowdown to AI development hitting a “wall.”
Instead, he believes the market has become oversaturated with suppliers offering nearly identical products.
While demand remains high and continues to grow, the ease with which users can switch between AI products—given their similar features—has made competition increasingly intense.
According to Pichai, it's like the AI development progress has reached its plateau.
While Pichai's statement mirrors the statements of other industry leaders in the field, it's worth noting that industry experts and company insiders actually think the opposite.
They believe that the development of AI is experiencing a bottleneck caused by the lack of new, high-quality data.
This is one of the reasons why experts speculate that some companies are exploring new approaches, like focusing on developing AI models that can reason.
"I don't fully subscribe to the wall notion," Pichai said, adding that he has a lot of confidence that there will still be progress in 2025.
"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," he said. "So you can perceive it as there's a wall, or there's some small barriers."
Regardless, Pichai believes that Google's search engine business should "change profoundly" in 2025.
"When I look at what’s coming ahead, we are in the earliest stages of a profound shift,” Pichai said. “I just think there’s so much innovation ahead. We are committed to being at the state of the art in this field, and I think we are."