In an episode of the New York Times' tech podcast "Hard Fork," Pichai said he asked LaMDA, one of the search giant's early conversational AI models, to pretend it was the planet Pluto to test its capabilities.
During one conversation, LaMDA told Pichai and his son that Pluto is "really lonely" because it's so far out in space.
"I felt sad at that point talking to it," the CEO said on the March 2023 episode of the podcast.
He also asked LaMDA what he should do for his father's 80th birthday. In response, the model suggested that he make a scrapbook.
"It's not that it's profound, but it says things and kind of sparks the imagination," he told the NYT when describing the prompt.
Google unveiled Gemini, its latest language model that could generate text and photos using prompts, in December 2023.