Sundar Pichai spent Alphabet’s Wednesday earnings call doing something he is not used to doing: arguing that Google is not, in fact, falling behind in artificial intelligence.
Analysts wanted to know why the next Gemini model had slipped, and whether the company had quietly ceded the frontier to OpenAI and Anthropic.
“We’ve had clearly frontier models,” Pichai said on the call. “There are many attributes on which we are still at the frontier; there are areas where we’ve acknowledged we need to improve and coding and agentic coding is an example of that.”
For a company that likes to remind everyone it invented the transformer, the admission was unusually candid.
The remarks answered a run of pointed questions from JPMorgan’s Doug Anmuth and Barclays’ Ross Sandler, who pressed him on a delayed Gemini Pro and a release schedule that has trailed rivals.
