Sundar Pichai on Google's AI, Microsoft's AI, OpenAI, and … Did We Mention AI?

Earlier this month, Sundar Pichai was struggling to write a letter to Alphabet's 180,000 employees. The 51-year-old CEO wanted to laud Google on its 25th birthday, which could have been easy enough. Alphabet's stock market value was around $1.7 trillion. Its vast cloud-computing operation had turned its first profit. Its self-driving cars were ferrying people around San Francisco. And then there was the usual stuff--Google Search still dominated the field, as it had for every minute of this century.