Google CEO eyes AI 'Manhattan Project' after Trump inauguration

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a recent interview that he is eyeing a research project on artificial intelligence (AI), similar to the Manhattan Project during World War II, after President-elect Trump returns to the White House next month.

“I think there is a chance for us to work as a country together,” Pichai said in an interview with Semafor published Thursday night. “These big, physical infrastructure projects to accelerate progress is something we would be very excited by.”

His remarks come nearly a month after the bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) proposed a similar initiative for funding AI development. The program would be part of a larger push to stay ahead of China’s technological developments.

“China has focused on developing emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), quantum technologies, biotechnology, and battery energy storage systems,” the congressional commission wrote in the report. “The United States has similarly realized the importance of technology competition with China and has significantly altered the policy environment.”

Google released its new AI model last year in an attempt to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT and others. A new version, Gemini 2.0, was released Wednesday.

“With new advances in multimodality — like native image and audio output — and native tool use, it will enable us to build new AI agents that bring us closer to our vision of a universal assistant,” Pichai said in a note upon the model’s release.

He told Semafor that “we already have capable enough models."

"We can build many, many use cases on top of it," the top Google executive continued. "That progress is going to be very real. With Gemini 2.0, we are laying the foundation for it to be more agentic.”

Earlier this month, Trump announced he selected venture capitalist and key ally David Sacks to be the White House's AI and cryptocurrency czar, a newly formed role.

Like other tech and business leaders, Pichai is looking to create closer ties to Trump following his victory in the election last month. The head of Google was also expected to meet with the president-elect Thursday, The Information reported.

“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,” Pichai said in the interview. “That’s the foundation.”

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