The AI Action Summit: A golden age of innovation

Editor’s note: Today, Google CEO Sundar Pichai spoke in Paris, France at the AI Action Summit. What follows is a transcript of the remarks, as prepared for delivery.

Good afternoon, everyone. It's a real pleasure to be here with you all today at the AI Action Summit.

President Macron, thank you for inviting me and for bringing together such an impressive group of leaders.

AI is a transformative technology that comes around once in a lifetime. It's through discussions like these, focused on collaboration and action, that we can truly advance this field.

As we wrap up today's sessions, I want to share a few reasons why I'm so excited about AI and its potential to benefit everyone, everywhere.

For me, improving lives through technology is deeply personal.

I grew up in Chennai, India, where new technologies took their sweet time to reach us. I remember waiting five years just to get a rotary phone. When it finally arrived, it was a game-changer.

Before that, I had to take a four-hour round trip to get my mother's blood test results. Sometimes, I'd get to the hospital only to be told, "Sorry, not ready yet. Come back tomorrow." But with the phone, all we had to do was make a call.

That experience showed me the power of technology to make life better. It set me on a path that led me to the U.S. and eventually to a small start-up called Google.

Back then, I never would have guessed that I'd one day be celebrating three Google colleagues receiving Nobel Prizes, or taking my parents for a ride in a driverless car, all within a couple of weeks. And it's all thanks to AI.

We're still in the early stages, but I believe AI will be the most significant shift of our lifetimes.

It's bigger than the shift to personal computing or mobile devices. It will democratize access to information more than the internet ever did.

In just 18 months, the cost to process one token—the basic unit of information—has dropped by 97% for developers. What used to cost four dollars per million tokens now costs just 13 cents, and I expect this trend to continue.

This means intelligence is more accessible than ever before.

So, we're at the cusp of a platform shift. But what makes it so profound? A few things:

As AI interactions become more intuitive and human-like, they put us at the center of the experience. Technology feels like a natural extension of ourselves, enhancing our capabilities, bridging gaps in expertise, and breaking down barriers like language and accessibility.

As a versatile technology, AI can be applied across various human endeavors and all sectors of the economy. Every company, every industry, and even the public sector will use AI in unique ways.

As AI continues to evolve, it will drive innovation, opportunity, and growth in economies worldwide, leading to an explosion in knowledge, learning, creativity, and productivity that will shape our future in exciting ways.

The potential of AI is enormous, and it's up to us to ensure as many people as possible benefit from it.

Why Google invests in AI

That's why Google has been investing in AI for over a decade. We saw it as the most crucial way to advance our mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Looking back at the last decade, our researchers have been behind many defining AI breakthroughs. From key language understanding techniques to an AI that defeated the world's top Go players, to the Transformer architecture that powers today's generative AI revolution and the most advanced AI models.

We're pushing the boundaries further. Our team's generative AI papers have been cited three times more than any other company or educational institution in the world.

Part of advancing the field involves building foundational infrastructure. This includes our network, spanning over two million miles of terrestrial and subsea fiber cables. We also have custom AI chips called Tensor Processing Units, now in their sixth generation. Over the past two generations alone, we've improved their carbon efficiency by three times.

This infrastructure enables frontier models like Gemini, which can process multimodal information across text, image, video, audio, and code, as well as handle long context and agentic capabilities.

It also allows us to make these cutting-edge technologies available to developers, entrepreneurs, businesses, and more.

Finally, we're building applications that make AI truly helpful to people everywhere. We now have seven products that reach over two billion users—like Maps, Search, and Android—all powered by our AI innovations and our latest Gemini models.

All of this together forms our unique full-stack approach to innovation, enabling entirely new experiences.

How AI is enabling new experiences

Some of the experiences I'm most excited about include deep research and thinking capabilities. They help people conduct in-depth research on specific topics, like having a personal research assistant that searches the web, analyzes information, and summarizes key findings.

For instance, if you're planning your summer vacation, you could ask a deep research agent, "Where in Europe should I vacation for two weeks in August?" In just five minutes, you'd get a comprehensive analysis considering factors like affordability, weather, visa requirements, and more—all with sources cited. And it's getting faster all the time.

Or maybe you want a model to draw only from specific documents you provide. That's what makes NotebookLM so magical. You could transform a pile of dense documents into engaging podcasts. Over just three months, people generated over 350 years' worth of these Audio Overviews. Businesses are using it to create a centralized knowledge repository that acts like an internal expert on policies, procedures, customers, and more.

As models become increasingly multimodal, they're getting better at understanding the world around you. Just point your phone camera at something near you and ask Project Astra about it.

What's really exciting is how Project Astra brings us closer to our vision for a universal AI assistant that seamlessly integrates into our lives across different devices and contexts. We're going to bring these capabilities to our products soon.

How AI is benefiting science and discovery

These are just a few examples of how people and businesses are using AI today.

But some of the most exciting examples are happening in science and discovery.

A powerful example is AlphaFold, a major breakthrough in predicting protein structures. That Nobel Prize toast I mentioned was a direct result of this work done by Demis and John at Google DeepMind. Demis—or should I say Sir Demis—is here today: let's give him a round of applause.

We opened up AlphaFold in 2021, free of charge to the scientific community. Today, over 2.5 million researchers from more than 190 countries are using it to develop new malaria vaccines, cancer treatments, and even plastic-eating enzymes. We estimate AlphaFold has helped save hundreds of thousands of research years.

One company building on AlphaFold is Isomorphic Labs, part of Alphabet, Google's parent company. They're using machine learning in the drug design process to improve the success rates of therapies while reducing overall time and cost. We have partners all over the world using our Cloud technologies for similar work—like Servier, here in France.

Quantum computing will also help scientists discover new medicines, design more efficient batteries for electric cars, and accelerate progress in fusion and new energy alternatives.

It's the next big paradigm shift in computing, following AI. And we're making good progress.

Our latest breakthrough was in December. Our state-of-the-art Willow quantum chip solved a computation in under five minutes that would take a classical computer ten septillion years—that's a one followed by twenty-five zeros, longer than the universe has existed, several times over.

And it did so while reducing errors even as the number of quantum chips increased. AI helped with that, by the way. We'll continue making progress on our journey to a fully error-corrected quantum computer.

Now, let me turn to an example that is very much a reality: fully autonomous, self-driving cars.

After years of scaling the technology, recent progress has been absolutely breathtaking.

In 2024, Waymo—operating in four cities—made over four million passenger trips.

One of those trips recently brought me and my parents to a park near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

I had obviously taken Waymos before, but watching my father, who is in his 80s, I saw the progress in a whole new light.

How AI is benefiting society

There are many other instances of how AI is already benefiting society. One example is expanding information access through languages.

When Google Translate first started, the models relied on languages being widely represented on the web. But for most of the world's languages, especially in places like Africa, that wasn't the case.

Using AI techniques, we added over 110 new languages to Google Translate last year, spoken by half a billion people around the world. That brings our total to 249 languages, including 60 African languages. More to come.

Another huge opportunity space is health.

Right here in Paris, we're excited to partner with Institut Curie to combine their world-class research with our cutting-edge AI. Our goal is to improve outcomes for women with a number of rare and deadly cancers, including identifying predictive biomarkers for certain uterine cancers or better predicting how breast cancer patients will respond to specific therapies. We're honored to work with Institut Curie on this.

In India and Thailand, we're partnering with local organizations to deliver six million AI screenings for diabetic retinopathy, a preventable cause of blindness. And we'll do this at no cost to patients.

Beyond health, AI is improving how communities respond to natural disasters.

Our AI-powered FloodHub forecasts now cover more than 100 countries and over 700 million people, giving local communities a seven-day lead time—even in areas where data is scarce.

We're also using AI to map the boundaries of large wildfires and get people accurate information in 27 countries around the world. Over the past year, it reached 30 million people and helped people get to safety during the LA wildfires last month.

Our new FireSat technology will give us even better tools. Using advanced sensors and high resolution, it can detect a fire as small as five-by-five meters. It's going to be a game-changer for firefighters.

In all these examples, I hope you can see the massive potential for AI to benefit people, boost economies, advance science, and address humanity's greatest challenges.

But these beneficial outcomes are not automatic or guaranteed.

It will take all of us working together on multiple fronts to make it possible.

What it will take to unlock AI's potential

Let me be clear about how we can do this.

First, we have to enable an ecosystem of innovators—and adopters.

I spoke earlier about the growing innovation ecosystem here in France—how do we create more of these pockets in more places?

And as Mario Draghi showed in his recent report, Europe's productivity depends on using these emerging technologies; and European competitiveness depends on productivity. So driving adoption is key, so that the productivity gains happen at scale and across the economy.

A second area is infrastructure. We're excited for the path President Trump, President Macron, and other countries are forging here. In capital expenditures alone, $300 billion is already committed from the major tech companies this year.

We announced last week that we expect to invest approximately $75 billion in capital expenditures in 2025.

Third, we have to invest in people and prepare them for the workforce ahead.

I saw a report from the World Economic Summit this year that estimates that a majority of jobs in Europe will soon be augmented by generative AI. And 7% of jobs will face automation. A report from the ILO suggests that the augmentation effect will be six times that of possible substitution.

We want to help prepare the future workforce for these realities.

Grow with Google has helped train 100 million people globally in digital skills over the last decade. And now our $120 million Global AI Opportunity Fund is focused on making AI education and training available in communities around the world. We'll reach 20,000 people across 24 countries in Europe.

Fourth, we have to act boldly to advance the most transformative applications of AI, and responsibly so that everyone can benefit.

That means addressing the technology's limitations, issues with accuracy and factuality, for example, as well as the risks of misapplication and misuse, like the creation of deep fakes.

It also presents new complexities, for example, the impact on the future of work, the need for energy, and the digital divide.

I think about how fortunate I was to have access to technology, even if it came slowly.

Not everyone had that chance.

With AI, we have the chance to democratize access from the start, ensure that the digital divide doesn't become an AI divide, and make AI helpful for everyone.

How public policy plays an important role in AI

Public policy will play an important role in delivering on these four areas.

Successful policy:

• Addresses risks without stifling innovation, progress, and positive impacts.
• Draws on existing laws and fills in gaps—rather than creating entirely new laws wholesale.
• Is aligned across countries. AI can't flourish if there is a fragmented regulatory environment with different rules across different countries and regions.
• And finally, governments need to take a thoughtful, strategic approach to AI to drive investment in infrastructure, people, and adoption, including by governments themselves.

This is an important and historic moment.

I think when history looks back, it will see this as the beginning of a golden age of innovation.

But these outcomes are not guaranteed.

The biggest risk could be missing out.

Every generation worries that the new technology will change the lives of the next generation for the worse—and yet, it's almost always the opposite.

I grew up doing math using logarithmic tables, and I was uncomfortable watching my kids learn math with smartphones. They've turned out just fine.

We must not let our own bias for the present get in the way of the future. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve lives at the scale of AI.

Let's do everything we can to make it possible.