The information was disclosed by the company during a SEC filing, which read: “There is no change to Mr. Pichai’s annual salary of USD 2 million.” The compensation package, that includes multiple stock-based incentives tied to shareholder returns, along with the performance of Alphabet businesses, also has another striking point: a significant presence of performance stock units (PSUs) with a target value of USD 126 million, divided into two equal tranches.

According to the SEC filing, these PSUs have been tied to Alphabet’s total shareholder return compared with the businesses registered in the S&P 100 index. Sundar Pichai’s payout could rise to twice the target amount, or USD 252 million, if Alphabet significantly outperforms peer companies in the American tech circle. If the company underperforms, the PSU payout could fall to zero. Also, the Alphabet CEO will further receive USD 84 million in restricted stock till 2029.

Apart from ensuring that Sundar Pichai continues to receive an annual base salary of USD 2 million, Alphabet has also included additional stock incentives tied to the growth of two of its technology businesses, Waymo and Wing Aviation.

According to the filing, the incentives will pay up to 200% of the target value to the Alphabet CEO, if performance goals for the businesses are met or exceeded. In that case, Sundar Pichai’s compensation by 2029 will reach USD 692 million.

Sundar Pichai, who became Google’s CEO in 2015, has helped the company increase its market capitalisation from about USD 535 billion to approximately USD 3.6 trillion. In January 2026, the figure, for a brief period, crossed the USD 4 trillion mark.

Sundar Pichai is not the only one getting a big pay package. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is also getting USD 4 million per annum as part of his revenue success.

However, the salary would amount to less than 10% of his annual compensation. The tech maverick, known as one of the prominent faces of the ongoing AI and semiconductor revolution in Silicon Valley, sold around six million NVIDIA shares in 2025, fetching him USD 925 million. He still owns around 3.5% of the corporation, amounting to a net worth of USD 150 billion. Jensen Huang is the 10th-wealthiest individual in the world, according to the latest Bloomberg reporting.

Just like Google, NVIDIA has also seen a great 2025 with a 65% year-over-year rise and a full-year revenue of USD 215.9 billion. Though growth has been exponential in the last year, it’s important to note that for the last six months, the trajectory has more or less flatlined.

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Office software users will soon have access to “confidentiality-preserving AI models” that can categorize and tag both new and old files in the Drive. According to the newspaper, the tools are a continuous, automatic data loss prevention strategy that also enables users to update labels as they see fit.

The adjustments are part of Google’s broader attempt to enhance the security and effectiveness of its enterprise offering. Based on a person’s location and security level, organizations can now restrict who can share what. It was stated that these enhanced data loss prevention features would soon be accessible in Gmail.

Regulating The Encryption Keys
Client-side encryption (CSE) in the Gmail mobile app and a few other security features have also been added by the search engine Goliath for Workspace users.

Enterprise clients may now own and manage their encryption keys, ensuring that Google (or other third parties) cannot see the content being shared through these apps, a few months after making it freely available. This should be encouraging for businesses trying to abide by stringent national and international data protection laws.

The feature will first be accessible in Google Calendar, Gmail, and Meet. The CSE will be providing feedback on Docs soon. The addition of support for Microsoft Excel files is currently being tested.

Users will also have the option to store a copy of their Workspace data “in a country of their choice” and specify the physical location where the saved data will be processed.

For Gmail and Google Calendar, client-side encryption was initially introduced by Google in October 2021 at the Google Cloud Next event. Early mentions of the feature date back to 2014, so it appears to have been in development for some time. Late in 2023 February, it was initially made available to all individuals, and now Google is making it available to business clients.

Meanwhile, Google’s cloud unit, which reported a profit for the first time in 2023, has emerged as one of the company’s best bets for growth, as per the news reports.

More than half of venture-backed generative AI start-ups pay for Google’s cloud computing platform, Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company. Of the start-ups valued at over USD 1 billion, 70% are Google Cloud customers, and about a third of those are helmed by former employees, including Anthropic, Character.ai and Cohere, the tech giant stated further. This development gives Google a way to extend its influence in the field even when it sheds talent.

Google’s cloud unit has emerged as one of the company’s best bets for growth as its core search business matures. Google still trails Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure in the market. However, start-ups in the field of generative AI are increasingly turning to the company, said James Lee, Google Cloud’s general manager for start-ups and AI.

“We’re seeing strong momentum in our business, and we see Google Cloud as the preferred choice for startups building generative AI,” James Lee said in a Bloomberg interview.

“Google Cloud customers have the option to use AI models from Google itself as well as other companies, a degree of flexibility that appeals to startups,” the official stated further.

Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said earlier in 2023 that by his count, over 2,000 start-ups have been created by former employees.

“I think it’s a healthy part of how the ecosystem works,” Sundar Pichai further said.

Elemental Cognition CEO David Ferrucci told Bloomberg that Google has also been in the AI space for so long, as he believes that the team will “talk a common language” when discussing his company’s needs. Elemental uses Google Cloud exclusively.

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ChatGPT, launched at fag end of 2022, has been dominating the headlines for the past two months. Microsoft’s rival Google was caught off guard by the OpenAI product launch. It has now come up with its own version of the AI chatting tool ‘Bard’.

However, it hit a roadblock after giving incorrect answers about James Webb Space Telescope and this incident resulted in a bloodbath for the Sundar Pichai-led company in the share markets.

Following its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has gained popularity for producing a wide range of legitimate content, including academic essays, poems, and job applications. It also cleared the Minnesota University Law School exam in January 2023, along with the Wharton MBA exam, and the US law and medical licensing tests.

Not only that, over one million people have joined the waitlist to test out the new Bing Search with ChatGPT capabilities, according to Microsoft.

The new Bing, available to some users in a limited preview, was unveiled by Microsoft in February 2023.

Doubts have been raised among academics on whether the chatbot will be used in an unfair manner by the students to clear-write exams and assignments. In response, OpenAI has come up with ‘ZeroGPT’, which will help users to detect whether the text has been written by an AI programme and passed off as human-written, or it was actually written by a person.

ChatGPT surpassed Bitcoin among popular search terms, according to the Google Trends report for January 2023. The San Francisco–based startup—with 375 employees now has a reported valuation of roughly USD 30 billion.

While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been the company’s face in media, the real brain who is leading the tech firm’s AI game is the 35-year-old Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati.

Who is Mira Murati?
• 35-year-old Mira Murati was born and brought up in San Francisco
• She did her Bachelor of Engineering from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in the United States
• Mira Murati started her career as a Summer Analyst at Goldman Sachs and was the senior product manager of Model X at Tesla from 2013 to 2016
• She joined OpenAI in June 2018 as Vice-President of applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Partnerships. From there, she became the senior vice-president of research and product.
• In May 2022, Mira Murati took over as the California-based tech firm’s Chief Technology Officer and led the ChatGPT development.
• Mira Murati has led the team which came out with DALL-E, a project which enables users to create realistic art from strings of text
• Googling Mira Murati’s name won’t show anyone a Wikipedia profile on the 35-year-old, while on Twitter, she has close to 64,000 followers and the last post from that handle came on February 17, 2023, where the 35-year-old shared a link of an OpenAI article titled ‘How should AI systems behave, and who should decide?’
• During an interview, Mira Murati said that the song she feels identified with is Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’ and her favourite book and movie are ‘Duino Elegies’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ respectively
• As per ‘Biography Reader’, Mira Murati’s hobbies include reading fiction, playing the piano, making chocolate and dancing salsa
• Mira Murati is Albanian with Indian lineage and speaks English, Italian and Albanian

Mira Murati’s point of view on ChatGPT and AI’s future

During an interview with Time Magazine, Mira Murati commented on ChatGPT clearing exams, “We weren’t anticipating this level of excitement from putting our child in the world. We, in fact, even had some trepidation about putting it out there. I’m curious to see the areas where it’ll start generating utility for people and not just novelty and pure curiosity.”

Talking about the chatbot’s current capabilities, she said, “Right now, it’s in the research review stage, so I don’t want to speak with high confidence on what problems it is solving. But I think that we can see that it has the potential to really revolutionize the way we learn. People are in classrooms of, say, 30 people. Everyone has different backgrounds, ways of learning, and everyone is getting basically the same curriculum. With tools like ChatGPT, you can endlessly converse with a model to understand a concept in a way that is catered to your level of understanding. It has immense potential to help us with personalized education.”

“[AI] can be misused, or it can be used by bad actors. So, then there are questions about how you govern the use of this technology globally. How do you govern the use of AI in a way that’s aligned with human values? It’s important for OpenAI and companies like ours to bring this into the public consciousness in a way that’s controlled and responsible. But we’re a small group of people and we need a ton more input in this system and a lot more input that goes beyond the technologies-—definitely regulators and governments and everyone else,” she elaborated, while speaking on the need for regulating the world of AI.

Image Credit: The Daily Show YouTube

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Vint Cerf cautioned against rushing to invest in conversational AI merely because “it’s a hot topic.” The warning comes as ChatGPT is experiencing a surge in popularity and Google is trying to take on the Microsoft-backed tech startup OpenAI with its Bard.

“There’s an ethical issue here that I hope some of you will consider,” he commented on Google’s Bard conversational AI.

“Everybody’s talking about ChatGPT or Google’s version of that, and we know it doesn’t always work the way we would like it to,” he said.

His caution comes amid tech firms’ struggle with maintaining competition in foolproof conversational AI.

John Hennessy, the chairman of Alphabet, stated that the systems are still far from being widely used and that several problems with “toxicity” and inaccuracy need to be fixed before the product is even tested on the general population.

Since 2005, Vint Cerf has worked for Google as a vice president and “chief internet evangelist”. As he collaborated on some of the architecture used to lay the internet’s groundwork, he is regarded as one of its “fathers.”

Although the technology is “really cool, even though it doesn’t work quite right all the time,” Vint Cerf advised against giving in to the desire to invest.

Vint Cerf remarked, “Man, I can sell this to investors because it’s a hot topic, and everyone will throw money at me.”

“Think carefully. You were correct in saying that we can’t always foresee what would happen with these technologies, but to be completely honest, the majority of the issue is people, which is why we as a species haven’t changed much over the past 400 years, much less the past 4,000,” he added further.

Vint Cerf stated, “They will seek to do that which is to their benefit and not yours. So, we must keep it in mind and exercise caution when utilising these technologies.”

According to him, there needs to be more clarity between what technology claims it can do and what it achieves.

“That’s the issue. You can’t tell the difference between an accurate and elegantly delivered response,” he said.

Vint Cerf gave an example when he asked a chatbot to provide him with a biography. He claimed that even though the bot’s response was inaccurate, it was presented as fact.

According to him, engineers like him should be in charge of attempting to discover a mechanism to control some of these technologies so that they are less likely to be harmful.

“A poor piece of fiction is one thing, depending on the application, of course. Offering someone advice can have medical repercussions. So it’s crucial to determine how to reduce the worst-case scenario,” he said.

Meanwhile, talking about the AI race, Google, which had a rocky start with its chatbot Bard in February 2023, is now implementing new methods to improve the chatbot’s efficiency.

As per Business Insider, the tech giant has already started companywide testing of Bard, with CEO Sundar Pichai asking his employees to spend two to four hours daily helping to test the chatbot before it gets integrated into Google search.

Google has started ‘dogfooding’ (testing by staff before it’s made publicly available) Bard since February 14, 2023. The chatbot reportedly has thousands of internal and external testers using it and submitting feedback.

After Bard’s launch, Google suffered a major reputational disaster as the chatbot offered incorrect responses to a question on the James Webb Space Telescope. This led to the search giant’s stock plummeting over 9%.

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The company is also putting Bard’s technology into Google’s search engine to make it easier to find answers to complicated questions.

Bard has been made available to specialised product testers in the first week of February 2023, and in the coming days, it will be made available to everyone. Like ChatGPT, Bard is run by a “large language model,” in this case, LaMDA from Google.

LaMDA and ChatGPT are significant language artificial intelligence models that use neural networks and computer programmes to simulate the human brain’s internal structure. By giving them a lot of text from the internet, these chatbots are trained on how to write answers to text-based questions.

Following its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has gained popularity for producing a wide range of legitimate content, including academic essays, poems, and job applications. Analysts estimate that there are already 100 million users. It also cleared the Minnesota University Law School exam in January 2023, along with the Wharton MBA exam, and the US law and medical licensing tests.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been vocal about Bard being as good as ChatGPT. Google’s information release on the chatbot included an example of Bard responding to a question about how to teach a nine-year-old about recent discoveries made by NASA’s James Webb space telescope and learning about the current top football strikers and receiving training routines to imitate elite players.

Sundar Pichai stated, “Bard seeks to combine the depth of the world’s knowledge with the strength, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models. It also uses data from the internet to deliver original, excellent responses.”

Google also said its search engine would incorporate the newest artificial intelligence technologies, including LaMDA, PaLM, the picture generator Imagen, and the music maker MusicLM.

Sundar Pichai also said that new artificial intelligence-powered search engine features would make complex data and different points of view easier to understand.

He gave the example of asking Google, “Which instrument is easier to learn, a guitar or a piano?”

Instead of providing a link to a single blog post, Google gave an example of a conversational answer to the question.

It reads, “Some claim the piano is easier to master, as the finger and hand movements are more natural, and learning and memorising notes can be more accessible.”

Others argue that learning guitar chords is more straightforward and that one may quickly master a strumming pattern.

To create apps utilising Google’s artificial intelligence technology, the company will also make the LaMDA technology available to developers, creators, and enterprises.

When a Google employee made public assertions that LaMDA was “sentient” in 2022, it quickly became a topic of discussion over the potential power of artificial intelligence. So, Google fired Blake Lemoine because they thought his claims about LaMDA, which stands for “language model for dialogue applications,” were “wholly unfounded.”

Google made its statement as Microsoft, a major supporter of ChatGPT, prepared to release other products utilising the chatbot’s technology. OpenAI, a San Francisco-based company that has secured a massive investment from Microsoft, created ChatGPT.

Users of Microsoft’s Bing search engine claimed to have seen a preview of a feature over the weekend that allowed them to ask queries up to 1,000 characters long with source citations in the answers.

In response to Google’s move, Microsoft is now revamping its Bing search engine and Edge web browser with artificial intelligence, in one of its biggest efforts to lead a new wave of technology and reshape how people gather information.

Microsoft is staking its future on artificial intelligence through billions of dollars of investment, while it challenges Google.

This rivalry may result in new competition in the field of cloud computing and collaboration products in 2023.

Working with OpenAI, Microsoft is now aiming to leapfrog Google and claim control over vast returns from tools that speed up content creation, automating tasks, if not jobs themselves.

“This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category,” Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella told reporters at company headquarters in Washington.

Investors are also expecting the artificial intelligence battle to create new markets. Shares of Microsoft rose 3.8% and Alphabet, Google’s parent, gained by 3.6%.

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine is live in a limited preview on desktop computers and will be available for mobile devices in the coming weeks.

Bing will be powered by artificial intelligence and run on a new “large language model” that is more powerful than ChatGPT, said Microsoft Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi. Bing is currently far behind Google in search market share.

Microsoft is now aiming to market OpenAI’s technology to its cloud customers and add the same power to its suite of products, including search.

Near-term, “the partnership with OpenAI is more relevant for its business customers,” said Gartner analyst Jason Wong, while interacting with AlJazeera. He, however, also said that it could offer “disruptive opportunities” in consumer businesses as well.

“Except for gaming, Microsoft has not been a leader in key consumer technologies, such as search, mobile and social media,” he added.

The rivalry in the field of search engines is now among the industry’s biggest, as OpenAI sets up Microsoft to expand its 9% share at Google’s expense, said Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities.

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According to Sundar Pichai, this performance will honour the creators and enhance everyone’s YouTube Shorts experience.

“Our subscription business continues to grow, with YouTube Music and Premium surpassing 80 million subscribers, including trials. Together with our YouTube Primetime channel subscriptions and YouTube TV, we have good momentum here,” Sundar Pichai said during the analysts’ call.

The National Football League revealed in December 2022 that YouTube had paid almost $2 billion a year for the “Sunday Ticket” rights.

Sundar Pichai said that YouTube’s National Football League Sunday Ticket will boost subscription rates, draw more users to the site’s paid and ad-supported experiences, and will create new opportunities for creators.

In the December quarter, YouTube’s advertising revenue was $7.96 billion, an 8% decrease from $8.63 billion the year before.

“Beyond our advertising business, we have strong momentum in Cloud, YouTube subscriptions, and hardware. However, our revenues this quarter were impacted by pullbacks in advertiser spend and the impact of foreign exchange,” Sundar Pichai added.

Sundar Pichai said that there are numerous opportunities built on progress at YouTube over the years, starting with monetizing YouTube shorts.

“Overall, I see this as an important journey to re-engineer the company’s cost base in a durable way,” the Google CEO said.

Meanwhile, YouTube has recently released the “Go Live Together” feature for creators to co-livestream and invite a guest on phone.

The company shared this news on Twitter by saying, “Introducing Go Live Together, a new way to easily start a co-stream & invite a guest, all from your phone! creators need 50+ subs to host co-streams, but anyone can be a guest!.”

The company also said it might add the function to YouTube’s desktop version.

“From our early tests, we know many of you are excited to see this feature come to the desktop so you can co-stream right from YouTube on your computer. This is something we’re still exploring,” tweeted TeamYouTube.

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Sundar Pichai reportedly stated that he intends to increase Google’s efficiency by 20% over the course of many years as he deals with concerns such as challenging economic times and frequent hiring.

The Google CEO provided information about the company’s plans to be more effective in the face of economic uncertainty and a general slowdown in ad expenditure while speaking at the Code Conference in Los Angeles.

“The more we try to understand the macroeconomic, we feel very uncertain about it. The macroeconomic performance is correlated to ad spend, consumer spend and so on,” Sundar Pichai said.

Sundar Pichai agreed that Google had been “slower” as a result of its increased staff but added that he had no control over macroeconomic aspects.

Sundar Pichai further added, “We want to make sure as a company, when you have fewer resources than before, you are prioritising all the right things to be working on and your employees are really productive that they can actually have an impact on the things they’re working on so that’s what we are spending our time on. Across everything we do, we can be slower to make decisions. You look at it end-to-end and figure out how to make the company 20% more productive.”

The Google CEO gave specific examples of how he intended to move forward with this. Sundar Pichai also provided examples of how Google Play Music and YouTube Music were combined into a single offering.

“Sometimes there are areas to make progress (where) you have three people making decisions, understanding that and bringing it down to two or one improves efficiency by 20%,” Sundar Pichai noted.

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Meanwhile, Amazon is facing a growing labor movement, and Facebook is facing a new advertising climate. Regulators domestically and abroad are threatening to crack down on the industry as a whole.

Social media giant Snap stock dropped by close to 40% on June 22, the day after reporting worse-than-anticipated sales growth. On the other hand, Netflix underlined concerns about sluggish economic growth after it lost customers last week.

Analysts are predicting next week’s numbers released by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Apple. Bloomberg this week already reported on a hiring and spending slowdown at Apple — a gauge for how much consumers are willing to spend — news that helped to propel the major stock market indexes lower.

“We need to be more entrepreneurial, working with greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days,” Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google-parent Alphabet said in a memo to employees.

Pichai said that the company will cut its frantic pace of hiring and new employees will be concentrated in engineering and other technical roles. Earlier this year, Facebook for the first time reported a decline in daily users, which combined with increased competition, a lower revenue forecast, and advertising business hurdles sent its stock prices plummeting.

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It also aims that by the end of this decade, the continent would host 800 million internet users along with a third of the world’s youth population.

Reports said that this facility will focus on making the user experience better for smartphone users in the region while efforts will be made to increase the reliability of internet availability.

Suzanne Frey, Vice President for Products and Nitin Gajaria, Managing Director – Sub-Saharan Africa, in a joint statement, said, “Google is right now hiring engineers, product managers, user experience designers and researchers to staff the new centre.” The company has said that they will hire close to a hundred staff members across a diverse set of expertise over the coming two years for this facility.

As for investment, the country will be investing $1 billion in several projects across the continent over the span of the next five years as stated by the CEO Sundar Pichai. In an event in October 2021,

Furthermore, Google has already an artificial intelligence centre in Accra, Ghana. Not only Alphabet, Microsoft too has been making its own technological hubs in Kenya and Nigeria by investing almost $100 million. Visa too had recently announced setting up an innovation centre in Nairobi.

According to reports, this marks Alphabet’s second-biggest investment in the continent after the AI and research centre in Ghana.

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