Google CEO Sundar Pichai says AI progress will get harder in 2025 because ‘the low-hanging fruit is gone’

Sundar Pichai said the “hill is steeper” for AI progress. 

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that while he doesn’t believe progress in AI development is hitting a “wall,” he does see it slowing down in the months ahead.

Speaking at The New York Times’ Dealbook summit on Wednesday, Pichai said Google was preparing to launch its next generation of models, but said he also expects progress next year to slow down.

“I think the progress is going to get harder when I look at ’25. The low-hanging fruit is gone,” he said. “The hill is steeper.”

Whether AI has hit a performance plateau is a major topic of debate within the industry right now. Some leaders, including OpenAI Sam Altman, have pushed back on the idea that AI is hitting a wall.

However, some industry experts and company insiders told B-17 there are bottlenecks when it comes to feeding models new high-quality data. As such, companies are exploring new approaches, such as focusing on how models reason.

Former OpenAI chief scientist and Safe Superintelligence cofounder Ilya Sutskever told Reuters last month that results from scaling up when it comes to pre-training models had plateaued. “Everyone is looking for the next thing,” he told the publication.

“I don’t fully subscribe to the wall notion,” Pichai said on Wednesday, adding that he has a lot of confidence that there will still be progress in 2025.

“When you start out quickly scaling up you can throw more compute and you can make a lot of progress, but you definitely are going to need deeper breakthroughs as we go to the next stage,” he said. “So you can perceive it as there’s a wall, or there’s some small barriers.”

Pichai added that the next wave of AI progress will require technical breakthroughs in reasoning and completing a sequence of actions “more reliably.”

During the discussion, the Google chief also took a shot at Microsoft after Andrew Ross Sorkin quoted its CEO, Satya Nadella, criticizing Google for not being the obvious leader in AI today despite having such a head start over its rivals

“I would love to do a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft’s own models and our models any day, any time,” Pichai retorted. “They’re using someone else’s models,” he added, referring to how Microsoft uses models from OpenAI.