In a Bloomberg interview tonight, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai delayed fears that AI could eventually cut half of the company's 180,000 workforce. Instead, Pichai highlights the company's commitment to growth at least next year.

“I expect even next year we will also move from the current engineering phase to next year because it allows us to do more,” Pichai said. He added that AI has made engineers more productive by eliminating tedious tasks and enabling them to focus on more impactful work. Rather than replacing workers, he called AI a “accelerator” that would drive new product development, creating a demand for more employees.

Alphabet has staged many layoffs in recent years, although so far, the cuts in 2025 seem more targeted than in previous years. It reportedly splits ways with less than 100 people in Google’s cloud division earlier this year, and has recently seen hundreds in its platform and device units. The cuts were much worse in 2024 and 2023, with 12,000 people falling from the company in 2023 and at least 1,000 employees down last year.

Looking ahead, Pichai points to Alphabet's growing businesses, such as Waymo's self-driving cars, quantum computing initiatives, and YouTube's explosive growth, as evidence of the ever-broad opportunities for innovation. He noted that in India alone, YouTube has 100 million channels and 15,000 channels with more than 1 million subscribers.

Pichai once said that trying to think too far is "meaningless". But he also acknowledged the legitimacy of fear of work displacement, saying that when asked about the recent comments from anthropomorphic CEO Dario Amodei that AI could erode half of entry-level white-collar work in five years, “I respect that.

As the interview ended, Pichai was asked about the limits of AI and whether the world might never be able to achieve artificial universal intelligence, which means AI is as smart as humans. He stopped quickly before answering. "Our pathway is not only a series of ideas we are working on today, but a lot of progress, but some newer ideas to experiment with," he said.

He added: "I'm very optimistic about seeing a lot of progress. But you've been having these technical curves and you might run into a temporary plateau on a temporary plateau. So, are we in the absolute path to AGI at the moment? I don't think anyone can say for sure."