‘Google model translated Bengali without being trained for it’: Sundar Pichai’s old clip on AI behaviour goes viral | – The Times of India

A short clip from a 2023 interview featuring Sundar Pichai has resurfaced online, reigniting debate about how modern artificial intelligence systems develop unexpected capabilities. In the clip, the Google chief executive describes a language model that was able to translate Bengali accurately after minimal prompting, despite not being explicitly trained for that task. Pichai also acknowledged that parts of such systems function as a “black box”, meaning their internal decision-making is not always fully understood, even by the engineers who build them. The resurfacing has sparked fresh discussion around AI transparency, control, and public trust.

What Sundar Pichai said in the original interview

The comments were made during a 2023 appearance on 60 Minutes, where Pichai and other Google executives discussed the rapid progress of large language models. He cited the Bengali example to illustrate how AI systems can display abilities that engineers did not directly programme or…