Google CEO Sundar Pichai says artificial intelligence influences almost every part of the company’s coding process, but believes fully self-improving AI systems remain a distant prospect.
However, humans remain closely involved, Business Insider reported. Business Insider previously reported that Brin has become more involved in Gemini’s development, pushing to direct resources towards 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. The prediction, however, remains uncertain.
Pichai expects this collaboration to progress into 2027, although he did not suggest fully autonomous AI development was imminent. Discussing the company’s Flash models and Gemini 4, Brin said Google was “starting to get onto that RSI treadmill. Meanwhile, a Gladstone AI report published this month said most researchers interviewed, including those from Anthropic and DeepMind, expected RSI to emerge within three to 12 months.
(Also read: ‘Sundar Pichai said no, no, no’: Donald Trump says Google CEO refused to rename Atlantic Ocean ) Speaking on the Big Technology Podcast with Alex Kantrowitz, Pichai said Google’s researchers increasingly use AI agents to develop new models. “We are pretty far from the end state of RSI,” Pichai said, referring to recursive self-improvement, in which AI systems contribute to developing improved versions of themselves. “And now our researchers and the model work hand in hand to make the next version of the model,” Brin said.
His remarks follow a more optimistic assessment from Google cofounder Sergey Brin earlier this month.
In April, the company said AI generated 75% of its new code. Pichai said Gemini 4 Argon would help engineers tackle harder problems. In a separate appearance on the Sources podcast, Pichai revealed that he also uses AI to follow Google’s model development and internal discussions.
Pichai also discussed AI’s growing role in Google’s software development.
That figure no longer captures the technology’s influence. (Also read: IIT Kharagpur celebrates Sundar Pichai’s TIME cover feature: ‘From our classrooms to global leadership’ ) “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,” he said, according to Pichai. “And so I think people are writing code more productively, and better code with it,” he said.
He also cited a one-third reduction in code rollbacks, which occur when developers restore an earlier software version following bugs or other issues.
