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Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at a panel at the CEO Summit of the Americas hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on June 09, 2022 in Los Angeles, California.

Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said “every product of every company” will be impacted by the quick development of AI, warning that society needs to prepare for technologies like the ones it’s already launched.

In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” aired on Sunday that struck a concerned tone, interviewer Scott Pelley tried several of Google’s AI projects and said he was “speechless” and felt it was “unsettling,” referring to the human-like capabilities of products like Google’s chatbot Bard.

“We need to adapt as a society for it,” Pichai told Pelley, adding that jobs that would be disrupted by AI would include “knowledge workers,” including writers, accountants, architects and, ironically, even software engineers.

“This is going to impact every product across every company,” Pichai said. “For example, you could be a radiologist, if you think about five to ten years from now, you’re going to have an AI collaborator with you. You come in the morning, let’s say you have a hundred things to go through, it may say, ‘these are the most serious cases you need to look at first.'”

Pelley viewed other areas with advanced AI products within Google, including DeepMind, where robots were playing soccer, which they learned themselves, as opposed to from humans. Another unit showed robots that recognized items on a countertop and fetched Pelley an apple he asked for.

When warning of AI’s consequences, Pichai said the scale of the problem of disinformation and fake news and images will be “much bigger,” adding that “it could cause harm.”

Google employees bash company after Bard debacle

Last month, CNBC reported that internally, Pichai told employees that the success of its newly launched Bard program now hinges on public testing, adding that “things will go wrong.”

Google launched its AI chatbot Bard as an experimental product to the public last month. It followed Microsoft’s January announcement that its search engine Bing would include OpenAI’s GPT technology, which garnered international attention after ChatGPT launched in 2022.

However, fears of the consequences of the rapid progress has also reached the public and critics in recent weeks. In March, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and dozens of academics called for an immediate pause in training “experiments” connected to large language models that were “more powerful than GPT-4,” OpenAI’s flagship LLM. Over 25,000 people have signed the letter since then.

“Competitive pressure among giants like Google and startups you’ve never heard of is propelling humanity into the future, ready or not,” Pelley commented in the segment.

Google has launched a document outlining “recommendations for regulating AI,” but Pichai said society must quickly adapt with regulation, laws to punish abuse and treaties among nations to make AI safe for the world as well as rules that “Align with human values including morality.”

“It’s not for a company to decide,” Pichai said. “This is why I think the development of this needs to include not just engineers but social scientists, ethicists, philosophers, and so on.”

When asked whether society is prepared for AI technology like Bard, Pichai answered, “On one hand, I feel no, because the pace at which we can think and adapt as societal institutions, compared to the pace at which the technology is evolving, there seems to be a mismatch.”  

However, he added that he’s optimistic because compared with other technologies in the past, “the number of people who have started worrying about the implications” did so early on.

Can China's ChatGPT clones give it an edge over the U.S. in an A.I. arms race?

From a six word prompt by Pelley, Bard created a tale with characters and plot that it invented, including a man who’s wife couldn’t conceive and a stranger grieving after a miscarriage and longing for closure. “I am rarely speechless,” Pelley said. “The humanity at super human speed was a shock.”

Pelley said he asked Bard why it helps people and it replied “because it makes me happy,” which Pelley said shocked him. “Bard appears to be thinking,” he told James Manyika, a SVP Google hired last year as head of “technology and society.” Manyika responded that Bard is not sentient and not aware of itself but it can “behave like” it.

Pichai also said Bard has a lot of hallucinations after Pelley explained that he asked Bard about inflation and received an instant response with suggestions for five books that, when he checked later, didn’t actually exist.

Pelley also seemed concerned when Pichai said there is “a black box” with chatbots, where “you don’t fully understand” why or how it comes up with certain responses.

“You don’t fully understand how it works and yet you’ve turned it loose on society?” Pelley asked.

“Let me put it this way, I don’t think we fully understand how a human mind works either,” Pichai responded.

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Elon Musk’s X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

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Elon Musk's X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.

About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.

Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.

The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.

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X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.

Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.

The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.

The site experienced another outage in March, which Musk attributed at the time to a “massive cyberattack.”

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk wrote in a post at the time.

This is breaking news. Check back for updates

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.

Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images

Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.

Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.

Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.

Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.

“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”

Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.

Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.

“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.

‘AI’s moment to shine’

Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nike already raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.

Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.

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“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.

Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”

Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.

‘Not a silver bullet’

While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.

“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”

AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.

“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty.  But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.

The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.

“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.

“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”

WATCH: Former OpenAI exec says tariffs ‘present AI’s moment to shine’

Former OpenAI exec says tariffs 'present AI's moment to shine'

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Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

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Amazon's Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.

On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.

“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”

Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.

A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.

The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”

If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.

Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.

The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”

Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”

While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.

Tesla is promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

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Tesla's decade-long journey to robotaxis

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