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On October 26, 2026, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview on the Big Technology Podcast that Google prioritizes allocating compute to frontier AI research and model development, and that its cloud business has therefore given up some short-term revenue. He disclosed that in the 72 hours before Gemini 4 Argon launched, usage approached 25 trillion tokens, roughly three times that of Gemini 3.0 in the same period, and that it is still capacity-constrained; in the four weeks after Argon's release, the volume of code change submissions inside Google increased by about 30%, while rollbacks fell by about one-third. Pichai also said that at present agents assist researchers in developing models with humans still in the loop, that fully autonomous recursive self-improvement is still far off, and that safety requires multi-layered protections such as real-time monitoring, sandbox isolation and customer control. This interview content is currently reported by 36Kr·AI, and there are no subsequent developments of fact.
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Oct 26
36Kr · AI
Pichai Long Interview: Google Prioritizes Compute for Gemini R&D, Cloud Business Gives Up Some Near-Term Revenue
In an interview on the Big Technology Podcast, Pichai said Google prioritizes allocating compute to frontier AI research and model development, and the cloud business therefore gave up some near-term revenue. He revealed that in the 72 hours before Gemini 4 Argon launched, usage approached 25 trillion tokens, about three times the same period for Gemini 3.0, and it is still capacity-constrained; in the four weeks after Argon's release, Google's internal code change submissions increased by about 30% and rollbacks decreased by about one-third. He also said that currently agents assist researchers in developing models with humans still involved, that fully autonomous recursive self-improvement is still far off, and that safety requires multi-layered protections such as real-time monitoring, sandbox isolation, and customer control.