At the World Governments Summit 2025, which took place in Dubai from February 11 to 13, Google CEO Sundar Pichai shared his opinion on intelligence, impacts and opportunities with AI, self-driving cars and quantum computing. 

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, shares insights on DeepSeek, highlighting revolutionary advancements in AI and quantum technologies. #WGS25#WorldGovSummit pic.twitter.com/Nz18ZlrUUT

— World Governments Summit (@WorldGovSummit) February 12, 2025

In a major endorsement of the autonomous vehicle (AV) technology, Pichai has revealed that Waymo, the company’s self-driving car division, has been highly focused on safety over the past 12 months. With over 33 million rider miles driven, he owed the rising progress to the work they’ve been doing with AI.

“We want to build a very safe and reliable Waymo driver, and once we do that, we can really scale up from there,” he added. 

Speaking more on progress, Pichai highlighted the company’s rapid expansion, stating that last year, Waymo served over 4.9 million passenger trips and is now averaging over 150,000 paid rides per week in the US across San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. 

“This is the first time any autonomous vehicle company has reached this scale,” Pichai added.

According to him, Waymo’s autonomous vehicles experience “78% fewer injury-causing crashes” than those driven by humans, marking a significant milestone for the future of transport.  

He also reiterated that Waymo aims to expand to “10 new cities by 2025”, with its first international testing set to take place in Japan. He emphasised the importance of collaboration with regulators and governments worldwide, inviting innovative countries to partner with Waymo in shaping the future of autonomous mobility.  

Quantum Computing Will Take to Real World in 5-10 Years

Not just self-driving cars, Pichai also expressed optimism about the future of quantum computing, predicting that practical applications of the technology will emerge within the next “five to ten years”. 

Speaking about Google’s advancements, he compared the current state of quantum computing to where AI was in the early 2010s.  

The significance of quantum breakthroughs lies in its potential for “error correction”, a crucial step toward building large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers, he said, referring to Google’s latest quantum breakthrough, the ‘Willow’ chip. This news led to an exchange between Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk with dreams of building quantum clusters in space.

This advancement could revolutionise industries such as cryptography, material science, and optimisation. However, Pichai cautioned that while the technology is advancing rapidly, it is still too early for regulation. 

Instead, he advised governments to “focus on understanding quantum computing and preparing for its impact”. “The first areas we would need to tackle are encryption, but beyond that, governments should think about setting up quantum clusters for pioneering research,” he suggested.  

This remark on the future of quantum computing from Pichai came after a statement from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang during an analyst event at CES. He suggested that bringing “very useful quantum computers” to market could take 15 to 30 years, citing the need for quantum processors, or qubits, to increase by a factor of 1 million.  

This statement triggered a massive selloff in the quantum computing sector, erasing approximately $8 billion in market value, according to some reports. Nevertheless, quantum leaders were quick to challenge this, and NVIDIA posted images of job postings for a quantum computing director and related positions the very next day.