Google’s chief AI officer announced on Monday that the business will invest more than $100 billion in developing AI technology, after his comparison of the billions of dollars invested in AI development to the frenzy around cryptocurrencies.
During a TED conference in Vancouver on Monday, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, answered questions regarding OpenAI and Microsoft’s purported plans to build a “Stargate” data center in the United States while discussing the tech giant’s AI investments. Bloomberg reported on the conversation. According to The Information, which cited anonymous sources, the data center may cost up to $100 billion and include a supercomputer made up of millions of AI chips.
Regarding Stargate, Hassabis responded, “We don’t talk about our specific numbers, but I think we’re investing more than that over time.” According to Bloomberg, he declined to comment further on Google’s budgetary intentions. Hassabis, who co-founded the AI startup DeepMind in 2010 before Google acquired it in 2014, is said to have also mentioned that Alphabet, the parent company of Google, possesses more processing capacity than its competitors, including Microsoft.
Hassabis stated, “We knew that in order to get to AGI we would need a lot of compute, which is one of the reasons we teamed up with Google back in 2014.” When artificial intelligence (AI) surpasses human understanding in a variety of tasks, it is referred to as artificial general intelligence (AGI). “Google possesses and remains the most” Hassabis said.
Hassabis stated to the Financial Times in March that the billions of dollars being invested in AI are like the excitement around cryptocurrencies and are diverting focus from the “phenomenal” science and research that is driving this technology.
Comparing AI to cryptocurrency and related fields, he stated that investing in the field “brings with it a whole attendant bunch of hype and maybe some grifting,” adding that the attitude “has now spilled over into AI, which I think is a bit unfortunate.”
But according to Hassabis, the sector is “just scratching the surface” of what is feasible. “Perhaps a new Renaissance or golden age of scientific discovery is dawning on us,” he remarked.
April 2024, Cryptoniteuae
