Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai Reaps $226 Million Compensation in 2022 Amid Layoffs

Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai received total compensation of about $226 million (roughly Rs. 1,850 crore) in 2022, more than 800 times the median employee's pay, the company said in a securities filing on Friday.

Pichai's compensation included stock awards of about $218 million (roughly Rs. 1,800 crore), the filing showed.

The pay disparity comes at a time when Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has been cutting jobs globally, The Mountain View, California-based company announced plans to cut 12,000 jobs around the world in January, equivalent to 6 percent of its global workforce.

Early this month, hundreds of Google employees staged a walkout at the company's London offices following a dispute over layoffs.

In March, Google employees staged a walkout at the company's Zurich offices after more than 200 workers were laid off.

Meanwhile, the company is working rapidly towards making its chatbot Bard stand out among the competitors. On Friday, Google announced that Bard, its generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, to help people write code to develop software, as the tech giant plays catch-up in a fast-moving race on AI technology.

Bard will be able to code in 20 programming languages including Java, C++ and Python, and can also help debug and explain code to users, Google said on Friday.

The company said Bard can also optimise code to make it faster or more efficient with simple prompts such as "Could you make that code faster?".

Currently, Bard can be accessed by a small set of users who can chat with the bot and ask questions instead of running Google's traditional search tool.

© Thomson Reuters 2023