Machine learning brings a fundamental rewiring of technology, he tells the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris
Artificial intelligence is the biggest shift of our lifetimes and will help accelerate human ingenuity, the boss of Google has insisted.
Speaking at the AI Action Summit in Paris, Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google’s parent Alphabet, told world leaders and his counterparts at the largest technology companies that although the shift towards machine learning was still in its early days, “it will be the biggest of our lifetimes — a fundamental rewiring of technology and an accelerant of human ingenuity”.
The gathering comes less than a month after American technology companies were rocked by DeepSeek, a Chinese AI start-up, which claimed to have produced a free open-source assistant that uses lower-cost chips and less data than its American rivals.
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The development called into question the heavy spending on AI by tech companies and prompted a sell-off that wiped billions of dollars off the market valuations of high flyers including Alphabet, which have since recovered some of the ground lost.
Earlier this month Pichai said that Google would spend $75 billion on capital projects this year, primarily on AI.
He said that the “ecosystem will only grow as costs continue to fall”, which would accelerate the adoption of machine learning. “Every company, every sector will use this technology in their own ways, including the public sector … The opportunity space is as big as it gets,” Pichai said.
He warned against letting a “digital divide” develop into an “AI divide”, referring to the gap between people in society who have full access to digital technologies and those who do not.
“Every generation worries that the new technology will change the lives of the next generation for the worse — and yet, it’s almost always the opposite. I grew up doing math on logarithmic tables, and I was uncomfortable watching my kids learn math with smartphones. They’ve turned out just fine.”
Alphabet’s shares have fallen by just over 8 per cent over the past week after it reported lower-than-expected sales from its cloud computing business, stoking concerns about the payoff from its big bet on artificial intelligence.
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Revenue from the cloud computing business, which sells services to companies adopting AI technology, rose 30 per cent to $12 billion in the fourth quarter.
Analysts had expected Alphabet to report a 33 per cent rise in revenue to $12.19 billion. The results signal a slowdown from the 35 per cent revenue increase in the previous quarter. The shares were trading up $1.37, or 0.7 per cent, at $188.51 in afternoon trading in New York.
https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/technology/article/ai-is-biggest-shift-of-our-lifetimes-says-google-boss-sundar-pichai-75n3d8d0n
