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Alphabet’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) CEO Sundar Pichai said his company will keep hiring engineers at least into 2026, as human talent remains vital amid rising AI investments by Google, Bloomberg News reported.
Pichai, who was speaking at the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, said he would continue to invest in engineering in the near future, the report added.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.
The potential plans from Pichai comes at a time when tech giants, such as Microsoft (MSFT) have been cutting jobs. Earlier this week, Microsoft laid off hundreds more employees, only weeks after announcing its largest layoff in years. Layoffs in the tech sector have scaled back so far in 2025, for the second year in a row, with Intel (INTC) and Microsoft reporting the largest workforce reductions. Nearly halfway into 2025, 137 tech companies have laid off a total of 62,114 employees, according to the tracker Layoffs.fyi.
Google itself has conducted rounds of layoffs in recent years.
“I expect we will grow from our current engineering base even into next year, because it allows us to do more with the opportunity space,” said Pichai. “I just view this as making engineers dramatically more productive, getting a lot of the mundane aspects out of what they do.”
Pichai noted that AI excels in areas such as coding, but the models continue to make basic mistakes, the report noted.
“So are we currently on an absolute path to AGI [artificial general intelligence]? I don’t think anyone can say for sure,” Pichai said.
AGI refers to the hypothetical intelligence of a machine which has the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human can.
As Google includes more AI into its search engine, publishers are worried that the company’s AI-generated answers deprive them of traffic.
Pichai noted that Google remains committed to sending traffic to the web.
“Compared to most companies in the world, we take care to design an experience which is going to showcase links,” said Pichai. “We took a long time testing AI Overviews and prioritized approaches which resulted in high quality traffic out. I’m confident that many years from now that’s how Google will work.”
At the same conference, Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said that there has been a cultural shift in the Silicon Valley and it is now more palatable for the tech industry to support the U.S. military’s efforts.
Last week, Meta noted that it is partnering with Palmer Luckey’s Anduril Industries to develop and build a range of extended reality (“XR”) gear for the U.S. Army to enhance soldiers’ sight and hearing, along with capabilities that allow for advanced interaction with artificial intelligence weapons systems.
“There’s a much stronger patriotic underpinning than I think people give Silicon Valley credit for,” said Bosworth as per the report.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.