Google CEO Sundar Pichai warns society to brace for impact of A.I. acceleration, says ‘it’s not for a company to decide’
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.”
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.
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.
FILE PHOTO: Ariel Cohen during a panel at DLD Munich Conference 2020, Europe’s big innovation conference, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich.
Picture Alliance for DLD | Hubert Burda Media | AP
Navan, a developer of corporate travel and expense software, expects its market cap to be as high as $6.5 billion in its IPO, according to an updated regulatory filing on Friday.
The company said it anticipates selling shares at $24 to $26 each. Its valuation in that range would be about $3 billion less than where private investors valued Navan in 2022, when the company announced a $300 million funding round.
CoreWeave, Circle and Figma have led a resurgence in tech IPOs in 2025 after a drought that lasted about three years. Navan filed its original prospectus on Sept. 19, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN.”
Last week, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that has substantially reduced operations inside of agencies including the SEC. In August, the agency said its electronic filing system, EDGAR, “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”
Cerebras, which makes artificial intelligence chips, withdrew its registration for an IPO days after the shutdown began.
Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and technology chief Ilan Twig started the company under the name TripActions in 2015. It’s based in Palo Alto, California, and had around 3,400 employees at the end of July.
For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year. Competitors include Expensify, Oracle and SAP. Expensify stock closed at $1.64on Friday, down from its $27 IPO price in 2021.
Navan ranked 39th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, after also appearing in 2024.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer during a CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer event at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 7th, 2025.
Kevin Stankiewicz | CNBC
Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following President Donald Trump’s threats for increased tariffs on Chinese goods.
With tech’s trillion-dollar companies occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines send the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.
After market close on Friday, Trump declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and on Nov. 1 it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”
Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about 2% in extended trading following the post.
The president’s latest threats are disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
In late September, Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline by nearly $229 billion on Friday.
OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only seeing rising demand.
In September it introduced the Sora 2 video creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now boasts over 800 million weekly users. But Microsoft must buy infrastructure to operate its cloud data centers. Microsoft’s market cap dropped by $85 billion on Friday.
The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. It competes with Microsoft to rent out GPUs from its cloud data centers, but it doesn’t have major business with OpenAI. The online retailer is now worth $121 billion less than it was on Thursday.
“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”
Tesla, which introduced lower-priced vehicles on Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.
The automaker reports third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week. Nvidia reports in November.
Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%, respectively.
WATCH: Pres. Trump: Calculating massive increase of tariffs on Chinese products into U.S.
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