India AI Impact Summit: Sundar Pichai offers a peek into the upcoming "hyper progress" phase, with a rider

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, in his keynote address at the India AI Impact Summit on February 12, gave a peek into the upcoming AI-led transformation of mankind, saying that the world cannot allow digital divide to become AI divide.

The world is on the cusp of hyper progress, Pichai said, with the help of AI as it will be able to solve the hardest problems -- the biggest of science problems.

In his address, Pichai touched upon his personal journey and made a major infrastructure commitment to India's digital future.


Pichai underlined artificial intelligence as a transformative technological shift that has the potential to accelerate progress across industries and enable emerging economies to bridge long-standing development gaps.

However, on a cautionary note, he added "No matter how bold we are, or how responsible, we won't realise AI's true benefits unless we work together."

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He said AI represents the most significant platform transition of our lifetimes and has the capacity to trigger a phase of rapid advancement and new discoveries. Such breakthroughs, he noted, could help developing nations leapfrog structural constraints and legacy shortcomings. However, he cautioned that these gains are neither automatic nor assured and would depend on deliberate action.

Pichai said, “It is wonderful to be back in India, where the pace of change is remarkable. Recalling student days traveling to IIT Kharagpur through Visakhapatnam, once a modest coastal city, it is now becoming a global AI hub with Google establishing a full-stack AI hub as part of a $15 billion investment. The hub will include large-scale compute and a subsea cable gateway, bringing jobs and AI capabilities to India. The transformation reflects how far technology and infrastructure have advanced."

He added, "Seeing a Waymo through his 83-year-old father’s eyes highlighted the progress made in technology. AI represents the biggest platform shift of our lifetimes, offering the potential for rapid progress and breakthroughs, especially for emerging economies, though its benefits are not guaranteed and require responsible collaboration. AI can improve lives and solve major scientific challenges, as shown by AlphaFold, which addressed protein structure prediction and is now used by millions of researchers worldwide for advancements such as vaccine and drug research.”

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In his address, Pichai highlighted India's growing role in the global AI ecosystem and the emergence of Visakhapatnam as a global AI hub.

Pichai said it is remarkable to see Visakhapatnam, where Google has made a significant investment, become a major centre for artificial intelligence as part of tech giant's long-term investment in India.

Explaining the basis for his optimism, Pichai highlighted AI’s growing role in advancing scientific research and delivering tangible benefits to society. He pointed out that AI systems are capable of improving billions of lives while addressing some of science’s most complex challenges.

For instance, predicting protein structures had remained an unresolved grand challenge for nearly 50 years, slowing the pace of drug discovery. Pichai said that Demis Hassabis and his team at Google DeepMind posed a bold question on how AI could be harnessed to tackle this problem. That effort led to the creation of AlphaFold.

The resulting breakthrough, which went on to win a Nobel Prize, effectively compressed decades of scientific research into a publicly accessible database. Today, more than 3 million researchers across over 190 countries are using the database to work on malaria vaccines, combat antibiotic resistance, and pursue other medical innovations.

Pichai added that AI applications now extend across the broader scientific ecosystem, ranging from cataloguing DNA disease markers to developing AI agents that function as collaborative partners in research. He said similar ambition must be applied to addressing challenges in regions that have historically lacked access to advanced technologies.

Reiterating the broader impact of AI, Pichai said the technology can spur innovation, unlock new economic opportunities, and help tackle pressing global issues. At the same time, he stressed that responsible and inclusive development will be essential to ensure that the benefits of AI are widely shared.