 Al Lucca/SemaforTHE SCOOP In an exclusive interview, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Semafor he’s ready to work on a “Manhattan Project” for AI when Donald Trump moves into the White House next year. “I think there is a chance for us to work as a country together,” he told Semafor earlier this week. “These big, physical infrastructure projects to accelerate progress is something we would be very excited by.” On the Pichai mood meter, the cerebral boss known for his zen-like calm was downright giddy at the company’s Mountain View campus Wednesday afternoon after a day of major product announcements, which followed a big breakthrough in quantum computing and Nobel prizes awarded for work done within Google. He was set to leave the next day to see President-elect Donald Trump, The Information reported and Semafor confirmed. The head of the $2.4 trillion company seemed to be enjoying a moment of relief after a few years of intense pressure that followed the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. Less than a year ago, the conventional wisdom was that Pichai may not last long in his role. On Wednesday, he told me he never had any doubt about the company’s direction. “Internally, I had a palpable sense of the progress we were making,” he said. “It’s definitely very satisfying to see the momentum, but we plan to do a lot more. We’re just getting started.” At the core of that innovation is Gemini, the company’s flagship frontier AI model. Google took a different approach from competitors, putting its research energy and chops into building a “multi-modal” model from the ground up instead of a text-based large language model. When Gemini launched a year ago, it didn’t stack up well against competitors in some key benchmarks, like coding. But Gemini 2.0, which came out Wednesday, seems to have leapfrogged ahead of Anthropic into the lead of SWE-Bench, a key indicator of AI capabilities. The metric shows Google is on the right track. And for Pichai, that goes back to decisions he made almost a decade ago when he became CEO of the search giant. “In 2015, I set the company in this AI-first direction. As part of that, we said we would do a deep, full-stack approach to AI, all the way from world class research, building the infrastructure … all the way from silicon on,” he said. “That’s the foundation.” | 
