Who Still Makes Google's Compute Decisions?

Sundar Pichai says the big compute decisions are still made by people in the loop, including him. He already runs internal agents that brief him on the model development arc and on how compute gets used.

He says catching the last 24 hours across pre-training chat groups, mid-training chat groups, and post-training data could easily take an hour a day. Agents now summarize that flow and bring it to him, and he still goes deeper often. Separate agents watch telemetry on compute usage by product area, efficiency, and utilization, and give him inputs and insights. Alex Heath asks whether any near-term future has AI making the compute decisions. Sundar Pichai says that even five years ago they used AI to make power consumption efficient in data centers. When allocation decisions get made, AI is a core part of the input. He treats the shift as a continuum: by the time a model handles the current problem, people have moved on to the next one.

He says weaving AI into the work, with extraordinary people still doing it, has made them better at what they do.