After Elon Musk and Sam Altman, Lex Fridman to interview Sundar Pichai on AI: All we know so far

Podcaster Lex Fridman has announced that he will soon be interviewing Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai for his podcast, and is inviting users to submit questions and topic suggestions. Fridman has previously hosted prominent AI leaders including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and xAI founder Elon Musk.

In a post on X announcing his podcast with Pichai, Fridman wrote, “I'm doing a podcast with @sundarpichai soon. Let me know if you have any questions / topic suggestions. The rate of AI progress has been insane. It makes me excited for the future (even more than usual 🤣) and excited to chat with leaders & engineers who are building that future.”

Notably, Google has recently rolled out various upgrades to its Gemini language models, Google Meet, Image 4 video/image generation mode, the Veo 3 video generation model, and its AI chatbot integrated with Google Search.

While Google appeared to lag behind in the AI race when ChatGPT made its public debut in late 2022, the company has since made significant strides. It is now considered one of the biggest players in the space, thanks to the widespread integration of Gemini’s AI models across its products—from Docs to Search, Gmail, and more.

Speaking about the power of AI in empowering users, Pichai said in an interview with the All-In podcast: “I think if you look at how much information means to people, I think they’re going to, each person is going to have access to information in a way they’ve never had before, so it feels very far from a zero-sum construct to me. And we are seeing it empirically when people are using search.”

Asked whether AI could eat into the profits of Google Search, Pichai responded, “You don’t think about it as a dilemma because you have to innovate to stay ahead, and you can lean in the direction of the user. It’s like one of the original principles of Google — follow the user, everything else will follow. I think the dilemma only exists if you treat it as a dilemma. All along in technology, you have these massive periods of innovation and you lean into it as hard as you can — it’s the only way to do it. You know when mobile came everyone was like you’re not going to have the real estate, like how will ads work, all that stuff. (But) mobile was a transition which ended up working great (for Google),”