Sundar Pichai says even more AI is coming to Google Search in 2025

By Andrew Tarantola Published February 5, 2025

Google Search on a laptop — Pixabay / Pexels

Google will continue to go all in on AI in 2025, CEO Sundar Pichai announced during the company’s Q4 earnings call Wednesday. Alphabet shares have since dropped more than 7% on news that the company giant fell short of fourth-quarter revenue expectations and announced an ambitious spending plan for its AI development.

“As AI continues to expand the universe of queries that people can ask, 2025 is going to be one of the biggest years for search innovation yet,” he said during the call. Pichai added that Search is on a “journey” from simply presenting a list of links to offering a more Assistant-like experience. Whether users actually want that, remains to be seen.

Recommended Videos

“I think the [Search] product will evolve even more,” Pichai continued. “As you make it more easy for people to interact and ask follow-up questions, etc., I think we have an opportunity to drive further growth.” And with any luck, Google’s AI empowered Search of tomorrow will stop recommending glue as a pizza topping.

The company also announced that it plans to spend about $75 billion in AI capital expenditures this year in an effort to keep up with the rest of the rapidly growing AI market. For comparison, Meta has announced that it plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion on its AI efforts in 2025 while Microsoft has committed $80 billion in AI capital expenditures.

However, it is increasingly unclear if those levels of expenditure are actually necessary, given the efficiency revelations emerging from DeepSeek’s recent model unveiling, which offers comparable performance to OpenAI’s latest models but at a fraction of the cost and power consumption. Pichai played down some of those concerns during the call, stating that Google’s Gemini family are, “some of the most efficient models out there, including comparing to DeepSeek’s V3 and R1.”

Andrew Tarantola

Former Computing Writer

Andrew Tarantola is a journalist with more than a decade reporting on emerging technologies ranging from robotics and machine…

Topics

Computing

U.S. courts will now make government use of spyware tools public

U.S. courts will soon start putting numbers on government spyware use

landfall-spyware-hacker

U.S. courts are set to begin publicly reporting how often federal judges authorize the government to use spyware and hacking tools to intercept real-time communications, giving the public its first standardized view of how frequently these surveillance techniques are being used.

The change will begin with data collected for the 2028 Wiretap Report, which will be published in 2029. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts told TechCrunch that the report will introduce a new “spyware/hacking” category covering wiretaps conducted using hacking tools and spyware, known to federal authorities as network investigative techniques, or NITs.

Computing

Mark Rober’s new CrunchLabs mysteries turn reading into a hands-on STEM adventure

Rober is expanding CrunchLabs with a series of mystery books focus on improving STEM skills with a fun twist.

Book, Publication, Comics

Mark Rober has spent years proving that science and engineering don’t have to feel like homework. His enormously popular videos turn subjects such as physics, robotics, and mechanical engineering into spectacular challenges, ingenious pranks, and machines that kids immediately want to understand.

CrunchLabs has carried that approach into the physical world with its Build Box subscriptions. Now Rober is taking it in another direction: children’s fiction.

Computing

Keychron made 96 blank keys somebody else’s problem

The 10-by-10 macro pad turns an empty grid into a customizable control panel

Computer Hardware, Electronics, Hardware

Keychron has built a 100-key macro pad for anyone who has ever looked at a keyboard and wished none of its buttons had jobs yet. The Keychron C100 8K costs $64.99 and presents a 10-by-10 grid with no letters, numbers, or commands assigned.

Four corner keys are reserved for lighting controls and can’t be remapped, leaving 96 programmable positions. That's still nearly an entire full-size mechanical keyboard devoted to shortcuts, except nobody has decided what any of them should do.