"We Were Working On Chatbot Too": Sundar Pichai On Google's Missed AI Moment

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently spoke about what it was like to lead the company that built the very foundations of today's AI and then watch OpenAI's ChatGPT take the lead in the AI race. He said Google had been developing its own chatbot and powerful AI models years before ChatGPT, but chose not to launch them.

Recalling Google's early chatbot experiments, Pichai revealed that the company had been working on AI long before ChatGPT was released. "We were working on an internal version of chatbot too. In fact, it was a chatbot. It became famous because there was an engineer at Google who thought it was sentient. Obviously, the technology wasn't anywhere close to that at that time but we were making a lot of progress," he said on Thursday at Saleforce's annual technology event Dreamforce.

Acknowledging OpenAI's move to go public first, Pichai said, "But you are right. Credit to OpenAI, they put it out first. In the consumer internet world, that is how things happen... I remember being at Google in 2006 and we were working on video search, and YouTube came out of nowhere. Or, if you were within Facebook, you saw how photos were popular in your feed and Instagram came out of nowhere."

Pichai added that while Google had been preparing its own chatbot, it was not yet ready for public release. "In a different world, we would have probably launched our chatbot maybe a few months down the line. We hadn't quite gotten it to a level where you could put it out and people would have been okay with Google putting out that product. It still had a lot of issues at that time and I would argue there was a lot of risk putting it out at that point," he said.

Speaking on the launch of ChatGPT, Pichai said his reaction was not frustration but excitement. "When ChatGPT launched, contrary to what people outside felt, I was excited because I knew the window had shifted. We had been building this technology for so long," he said.

The Google chief explained how the company's investment in AI positioned it strongly. "I had decided to take a full-stack approach to AI. We were investing all the way from infrastructure, we built our own chips, to world-class research teams in Google Research, Google Brain, Google DeepMind, and the models and so on," Pichai said.

He added that the company has since accelerated its AI roadmap. "We kickstarted Gemini. We brought Google Brain and Google DeepMind together and we've been rapidly iterating since then. Now we have Gemini 2.5 outside; we are working on Gemini 3.0 which we will release this year, and the progress has been extraordinary," he said, adding that the next year will be even more exciting for AI.

"I think the progress in 2026 is going to be even more exciting than 2025, so I couldn't be more excited," Pichai stated.