THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE WHAT MODERN LIFE would look like without Google.

- VERA BERGENGRUEN, HARRY BOOTH, CHARLIE CAMPBELL, ANDREW R. CHOW, KATHARINE GAMMON, CHAD DE GUZMAN, CAROLINE HASKINS, AYESHA JAVED, GARRISON LOVELY, TEKENDRA PARMAR, BILLY PERRIGO, THARIN PILLAY, ASTHA RAJVANSHI, YASMEEN SERHAN, AND STEPHEN THOMAS; WITH REPORTING BY LESLIE DICKSTEIN AND JULIA ZORTHIAN

Sundar Pichai

GOOGLE AND ALPHABET

Its search business prints hundreds of billions of dollars in yearly revenue. Starting over two decades ago, Google began channeling some of that money toward AI research. Its industry-leading scientists were responsible for many of the breakthroughs that drove the field to its current inflection point. And yet the product that in late 2022 kick-started today's AI boom, ChatGPT, came from a startup backed by Google's major competitor, Microsoft. Suddenly Google was no longer the symbolic leader of the AI race, but instead playing catch-up.

Google's CEO Sundar Pichai, who joined the company in 2004, took that hurdle in stride. Google wasn't the first to build a search engine, he points out, but was the first to build one good enough to attract the lion's share of the market. The same for browsers. Email. Maps. His point: it matters less whether Google is first, and more that its version is the best. The U.S. Department of Justice takes an alternative view: that Google's search is a monopoly upheld by illegal anticompetitive actions. On Aug. 5 a judge ruled in favor of that argument; Pichai says Google plans to appeal.

Facing that giant risk to its business, Google has begun to introduce generative AI tools into products with billions of users, the most visible being Google Search, where new "AI Overviews" are now appearing above the familiar 10 blue links. Pichai spoke with TIME about how the tech giant is approaching the AI future.

Google is now rolling out AI Overviews in Search, which is the front door to the internet for most people. How are you thinking about the ripple effects of that?