We operate our AI research to aid improve the lives of billions of people around the world
Building useful products with novel technologies has always been one of my greatest joys. As a boy, I spent hours connecting resistors, capacitors, and other electronic components with wires. First, I would assemble a circuit using Morse code. Then I would disassemble the circuit, reusing its wires and components to build a timer. And then I would disassemble the timer and build an amplifier. Analog electronic components provided the perfect tools for juvenile minds like mine to build and create.
Soon I was designing processing chips in my first summer job at Marconi, the telecommunications giant. That led to studying electronics and software at university, where we built circuit boards for radio receivers on lab days. Now we have pocket computers and colossal data centers—all connected by light-speed communications—running powerful software for the benefit of businesses, communities, and consumers around the world.
But it is artificial intelligence (AI) that holds the greatest potential for humanity. This technology learns and iterates, with the ability to solve problems at every turn. When combined with human ingenuity and direction, AI can discover novel solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges, at speeds and scales previously unimaginable.
AI is not an exaggeration – it is probably the best general-purpose tool. As the Chief Business Officer (CBO) of one of the world’s leading AI companies, I see and feel every day how this technology can enrich the lives of billions of people around the world.
Finding the best ways to operate AI to create helpful products is a key focus of my work and life today, and it’s often a topic of conversation in my external meetings with business leaders, product people, and engineers—like my upcoming keynote at AI Hardware Summit this week.
Taking research outside the laboratory
As a CBO, my primary focus is on leveraging our groundbreaking research discoveries and aligning our technologies to solve everyday business problems. This intersection is phenomenally exhilarating because in many cases we are working in uncharted territory, introducing tools that promise to solve problems for billions of people around the world.
As a forward-thinking research organization, I’m often asked why it’s crucial to work on global challenges that impact people every day? One of the things (but not the only thing!) that makes DeepMind so unique is our ability to connect leading-edge AI research to hundreds, if not thousands, of AI-ready problems that impact billions of people.
We’re building one of the largest libraries of AI solutions in the world, and our parent company, Alphabet, has an incredible market of problems to solve. Together, we can focus on the hardest technical challenges with the greatest rewards, creating meaningful products that aid billions of people in the moments that matter.
For example, we’ve helped extend the battery life of Android phones, which are used by more than a billion people every day. That can be a lifesaver, especially in times of need. It’s one of the most universally requested problems to solve, and it will become increasingly crucial as we move toward a cleaner, greener world.
One of the greatest challenges and opportunities of working in this industry is finding ways to harness the power of AI while ensuring that our work is secure, ethical, and inclusive at every stage – from research and development to application and impact.
In recent years, we have gone from talking about the potential of our work to actually having billions of people operate it every day. And now we are at a stage where we are applying AI to Nobel Prize-level problems in science and society.
Helping people on a immense scale
But with so much potential, where do we begin? To ensure our work is applied in the most effective way possible, we start by looking for fundamental, transformative challenges that, if solved, could aid solve many other efficiencies across a wide range of problems.
One of our most eminent examples is AlphaFold, our AI system that can accurately predict the structures of proteins, the building blocks of life. With this system, we helped solve this 50-year-old grand challenge in biology, which now helps scientists around the world advance their work.
We’re also working in areas like sustainability, specifically exploring ways AI can aid optimize energy production and operate. For example, we’ve created an AI system that can control the plasma in a nuclear fusion process, which could lead to safer, cleaner energy production. We’ve also helped reduce energy consumption in Google’s massive data centers, improving energy efficiency and reducing emissions. These advances are game-changing for how energy is managed and used in society.
Similarly, MuZero has shown such great potential to save time and energy on a immense scale. It was initially created to develop game intelligence, and now it helps improve the YouTube experience. Almost seven hundred thousand hours of content are watched on YouTube every minute. That’s a staggering amount of traffic on the web. By optimizing ways to compress videos, for example, we’ve reduced data and energy consumption and helped make video content more accessible worldwide.
Looking to the future
AI is undoubtedly the most transformative technology of our time. This extraordinary promise also requires extraordinary caution. Predicting the potential impact of a technology as general and transformative as AI is indeed arduous, so careful consideration is imperative.
That’s why we’ve developed a long-term scientific roadmap to aid guide our research. And as we continue on this journey, we’re continually assessing the long-term impact of our work to ensure it’s being implemented safely and responsibly.
We need the brightest minds to work on things carefully, step by step. This is too large, too crucial to move quickly and break things, so responsible pioneering is at the heart of everything we do.
It’s incredibly inspiring to really connect with the breadth of problems our work helps solve and the potential for enormous benefit to humanity through our access to billions of people around the world. To me, that connection is truly extraordinary.