In court, the CEO defends his company against the DOJ
Search for Privacy and Security in Google: Sundar Pichai, CEO, Lead Developer, Artificial Intelligence, and Open AI’s Chatbot
Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, took the stand on Wednesday during the remedies phase of the company’s search antitrust trial, and offered a simple message. It might be hard to justify building a search engine at all if the US government succeeds in getting rid of the search monopoly that is held by Google.
Pichai called this a “dynamic moment” when a number of newly developed chatbots are reaching tens of thousands of users each day. Pichai said Google views its AI chatbot, Gemini, as a leading model in the industry, but still a “big gap” remains between them and what he views as the market leader: OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Pichai said he sees AI disrupting search in a few years. AI “will deeply transform” Google search, Pichai replied, and the way it will evolve will be very profound.
He told the company to invest in the technology and become “ai first” because he believed people were not just looking for information on the internet but seeking to get things done. He said that it’s possible that the computer could do that.
“AI is one of the most profound technologies humans will ever work on,” Pichai said. He said that there’s a market for artificial intelligence and that one of the largest companies in the world spent close to $50 billion on research and development.
The proposal by the DOJ is so far reaching and extraordinary it feels as though the government wants to sell off the company’s intellectual property. He said it’s unclear how Google could go on to fund innovation if its work is to be given away at marginal cost.
After next week, witnesses will be called, and closing arguments will be made at the end of May. Mehta is expected to make a decision by August.
One consistent point of questioning from the DOJ has been whether Google is the only company that can take care of its users’ experience and privacy. (It’s mostly a tactic to force Google to say, no, of course not, over and over again.) When Veronica asked whether another company could take care of the security and privacy of its clients, Pichai was not happy. He cited “a cultural commitment” to Chrome and the web, and said that “I haven’t seen, since we built Chrome, any other company make the kind of investments” Google has. Even not knowing who might buy Chrome, he said he worries about what might become of the world’s most popular browser in any other hands but his.
When it filed its original case in 2020, the Justice Department took aim at Google’s contracts with device makers like Apple and Samsung, which made the company’s search engine the default on new phones. The DOJ argued that this unfairly boxed out competitors, and they’re asking Mehta to rule that Google must stop paying for exclusive default placements.
Pichai wore a dark suit and spoke from the witness box during the second week of the remedies trial, which will decide which penalties the judge will impose on the company. Almost a year ago, Mehta ruled that Google had acted illegally to maintain a monopoly on the search engine market.
The proposal that the Justice Department made to force Google to share its search data, if passed, would be a “declamation” of the company’s search engine, which took decades of investment and innovation to build, said the CEO in court.
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But AI developers can also use databases like these to train large language models, like chatbots, so that they can generate human-like responses and engage in conversations.
Over a billion dollars were spent on Chrome in the last year, as well as tens of billions in the last decade. He noted that many other browsers run on the open-source Chromium infrastructure, and that Google is responsible for more than 90 percent of its code commits. Other companies can build browsers, Pichai said, “but no one has shown a commitment to the level of investment we put in.”
The deals Google makes for search placement have been a key factor in this trial, and of course Google’s relationship with Apple came up as well. Pichai argued that Google should be allowed to continue paying for placement, as long as its deals are not exclusive. Google has already begun changing its deals to that effect, including with Apple: Onyema inquired as to if a deal would be reached by the middle of this year to make one of the options in Apple Intelligence, and whether Pichai would confirm a product out in market soon after. This would be a type of multi-provider deal that was not allowed before by the search giant.
The DOJ says that is the only way to level the playing field. Pichai’s obvious goal was to convince Mehta that the proposed changes wouldn’t just prop up competitors, but would also make it impossible for Google to continue being an innovative company. If we had to share our IP at a slight cost it was not clear to me how we would have any value for it.