Applying AI research to enrich the lives of billions of people around the world.
Creating useful products with new technologies has always been one of my greatest joys. As a child, I spent hours connecting resistors, capacitors, and other electronic components with wires. Let’s first assemble the Morse code circuit. Then, disassemble the circuit and reuse the wires and components to create the timer. Then disassemble the timer and build an amplifier. Analog electronics provided a perfect toolkit for young people like me to build and create.
Soon I was designing processing chips at my first summer job at telecommunications giant Marconi. This led me to study electronic engineering and software in college, and in the lab I would make circuit boards for radio receivers. We now have pocket-sized computers and massive data centers running powerful software for the benefit of businesses, communities, and consumers around the world, all connected by light-speed communications.
However, it is artificial intelligence (AI) that holds the greatest potential for humanity. This technology has the ability to learn and iterate to solve problems at every moment. When combined with human ingenuity and direction, AI can discover new solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges at a speed and scale previously unimaginable.
AI is not an overstatement. Perhaps the ultimate general purpose tool. As the Chief Business Officer 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 use AI to create useful products is a major focus of my work and life today. It’s a frequent topic of conversation at external meetings with business leaders, product people, and engineers, like the keynote scheduled for this week’s AI Hardware Summit.
Conduct research outside the lab
As CBO, my primary focus is to leverage cutting-edge research breakthroughs and apply technology to solve everyday business problems. This intersection is incredibly exciting because, in many cases, we are working in uncharted territory while introducing tools that promise to solve problems for billions of people around the world.
As a forward-thinking research organization, I am often asked why it is important to address the global challenges that affect people every day. One of the things that makes DeepMind special (but not the only one!) is its ability to connect leading AI research to hundreds and thousands of AI-enabled problems that affect billions of people.
We’ve built one of the largest libraries of AI solutions in the world, and our parent company, Alphabet, has an incredible market with many problems to solve. Together, we can focus on the hardest technological challenges to reap the greatest rewards and create useful products that help billions of people when it matters.
For example, we helped extend the battery life of phones for the Android operating system that more than a billion people use every day. This can be a lifesaver, especially when you need it. This has been one of the most common problems to solve, and will become increasingly important as we move toward a cleaner, greener world.
One of the biggest challenges and opportunities when working in this field is finding ways to harness the potential of AI while ensuring our work is safe, ethical and inclusive at every stage, from research and development to application and impact.
In recent years, we’ve gone from talking about the potential of our work to actually benefiting billions of people every day. And now we are at the stage of applying AI to Nobel Prize-level problems in science and society.
Bringing benefits to people’s lives at scale
But with so much potential, where do you start? To ensure that our work is applied in the most effective way possible, we start by searching for key, innovative challenges that, if solved, could help address many other efficiencies across a wide range of problems.
One of the most notable examples of this is AlphaFold, an AI system that can accurately predict the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life. With this system, we’ve helped solve a 50-year-old challenge in biology, and now it’s helping scientists around the world advance their research.
We have also been working in areas such as sustainability, particularly how AI can help optimize energy production and consumption. For example, we have developed AI systems that can control plasma during nuclear fusion, enabling safer and cleaner energy production. We’ve also helped Google reduce energy consumption in its massive data centers, improving energy efficiency and reducing emissions. These developments are game-changing for how society manages and uses energy.
Likewise, MuZero has shown a lot of potential to save time and energy at scale. Initially built to improve gaming intelligence, it now helps improve your YouTube experience. Nearly 700,000 hours of content are viewed on YouTube every minute. This is a surprising amount of web traffic. For example, by optimizing video compression methods, we have helped reduce data and energy usage and make video content more accessible globally.
Looking to the future
AI is undoubtedly the most transformative technology of our time. This special promise requires special care. Predicting the potential impact of a technology as common and transformative as AI is truly difficult, so careful consideration is essential.
For this reason, we have designed a long-term scientific roadmap to help guide our research. And as we move forward on this journey, we are continuously assessing the long-term impact of our work to ensure it is distributed in a safe and responsible manner.
We need to have the smartest minds to do things carefully, step by step. This is too big and important to move quickly and break things. That’s why pioneering responsibly is at the heart of everything we do.
It’s incredibly inspiring to be able to really connect with the wide range of problems our work helps solve and the potential it has to bring enormous benefits to humanity by reaching billions of people around the world. To me, that combination is really special.