Sundar Pichai Reveals Google's Early Chatbot Development and AI Strategy Before ChatGPT

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently addressed the company's position in the AI race during Salesforce's annual technology event Dreamforce, revealing insights about Google's early work on chatbots before ChatGPT gained prominence.

Pichai disclosed that Google had been developing its own chatbot and powerful AI models years before ChatGPT's release but chose not to launch them publicly. "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 explained.

Acknowledging OpenAI's initiative to launch first, Pichai credited them: "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 elaborated that Google's chatbot wasn't ready for public release at that time. "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 stated.

Contrary to external perceptions, Pichai's reaction to ChatGPT's launch was one of excitement rather than frustration. "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 shared.

The Google CEO highlighted the company's comprehensive approach to AI development: "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."

Since then, Google has accelerated its AI roadmap significantly. "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," Pichai noted.

Looking ahead, he expressed enthusiasm about future AI developments: "I think the progress in 2026 is going to be even more exciting than 2025, so I couldn't be more excited."