Google’s AI models may be helping to build their successors, but CEO Sundar Pichai says the moment of fully self-improving AI is still a while away.
Speaking on an episode of the “Big Technology Podcast” this week, Pichai said that Google researchers were using AI agents to assist them when building models, but caveated that it was still early days.
“We are pretty far from the end state of RSI,” said Pichai, referring to recursive self-improvement. “The right way to describe it is, you have RSI loops along with AI researchers in various aspects of model development. I would say you almost have agents helping AI researchers, in some automated way, work together to build these models.”
Pichai added that he expected that continuum to keep making progress into next year.
Earlier this month, Google cofounder Sergey Brin said the company’s Flash series of models, as well as Gemini 4, were demonstrating how AI was helping to build itself, and that Google was “starting to get onto that RSI treadmill.”
“And now our researchers and the model work hand in hand to make the next version of the model,” he said.
Brin has been increasingly involved in Google’s Gemini efforts and has leveraged his power as cofounder to shift resources to projects he deems most effective, Business Insider previously reported. This has included pushing for more focus on RSI.
A report from the firm Gladstone AI, published earlier this month, said that most researchers interviewed from companies including Anthropic and DeepMind believed RSI will start within the next three to 12 months, and possibly sooner without government intervention.
In another moment on the “Big Technology Podcast,” Pichai was asked about how much AI was being used to code internally. The company said in April that 75% of new code inside Google was generated by AI.
“That number in our world today is like meaningless in the sense that every part of code we now touch is influenced by AI deeply,” Pichai said. With Gemini 4 Argon, he said, people were going to tackle harder problems. He also said Google was seeing a one-third decrease in code rollbacks, where software is reverted to a previous version because of a bug or system issue.
“And so I think people are writing code more productively, and better code with it,” he said of AI tools.
Pichai also uses AI to track Google’s model development and internal discussions, he told the “Sources” podcast this week.
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