Pichai said he had spent time with Musk a couple of weeks ago to talk to him about his “ability to build future technologies into existence,” adding, “I think it’s just unparalleled.”
Friedberg said everyone out there thinks “there’s a winner and everyone else is a loser.”
“But this is an entirely new world that’s going to be a lot bigger than the world we had last year,” Friedberg said. “And everyone’s building down their own path.”
Google didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s request for additional comment.
The Google CEO also said he’s “fortunate to know all of them,” and that “only one of them has invited me to a dance.”
Also because AI is a relatively nascent technology, it is likely to face even more competition in the future, Pichai said. He noted that Google wasn’t even around yet when the internet was launched in 1983. The dominant search engine didn’t pop up until 1998.
“There are companies that haven’t been started yet [that] might be extraordinarily big winners in the AI thing,” Pichai said. AI is going to be a much “bigger opportunity landscape than all the previous technologies we have known combined.”
Plus, Google plans to use its own AI tools to run its business by using it to write code or “even running some of our key processes,” Ashkenazi said during the earnings call.
But AI implementation takes time.
“We’re going to continue to focus on that so that we can support the growth in other areas,” Ashkenazi said. “[It’s] not a one-quarter type of effort.”
