DeepMind CEO says Google will spend more than $100 billion on AI

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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The chief of Google’s AI business said that over time the company will spend more than $100 billion developing artificial intelligence technology — another sign of the investing arms race that has gripped Silicon Valley.

Google DeepMind Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis was asked at a TED conference in Vancouver on Monday about a potential $100 billion supercomputer dubbed “Stargate,” being planned by Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI, according to a report in the Information last month.

“We don’t talk about our specific numbers, but I think we’re investing more than that over time,” Hassabis replied, without giving details on the spending. He also said that Alphabet Inc. has superior computing power to rivals including Microsoft. Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010 before it was acquired by Google a decade ago.

“That’s one of the reasons we teamed up with Google back in 2014, is we knew that in order to get to AGI we would need a lot of compute,” he continued, referring to artificial general intelligence — a debated threshold that can mean machines which perform better than humans on a wide array of tasks.

“That’s what’s transpired,” he said. “And Google had and still has the most computers.”

The global interest sparked by OpenAI’s ChatGPT showed Hassabis that the public was ready to embrace AI systems, he said, even if they were still flawed and prone to errors.

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KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow