Uphill Battle Google CEO Sundar Pichai is saying sayonara to the era of easy AI advancements. At the New York Times Dealbook Summit last week, Pichai sat down to discuss one of the biggest questions hanging over the tech industry right now: whether or not current techniques for improving AI models are reaching their limit. He was a little mealy-mouthed when it came to directly addressing the technical side of the issue, but was unequivocal that the effortless newbie gains that AI development initially enjoyed are over. “I think the progress is going to get harder,” Pichai said at the Dealbook summit. “When I look at ’25, the low-hanging fruit is gone. The hill is steeper.” Wall to Wall Fears that generative AI improvements were hitting a wall came to a head last month, as reports trickled out that OpenAI researchers discovered that the company’s upcoming large language model, code-named Orion, demonstrated significantly less improvement — and in some cases no clear advances at all — than previous iterations did over their predecessors. This lent credence to the suspicion that bolstering AI models by adding more data and computing power, or “scaling,” was finally showing diminishing returns as many experts had predicted. In response, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman smugly dismissed those claims, tweeting “there is no wall,” while others in the organization have hyped up its AI capabilities even further. Pichai says he doesn’t “fully subscribe to the wall notion” himself — but agrees that AI developers will have to…Google CEO Says Easy AI Gains Are Over