After comparing the billions of dollars spent on the development of artificial intelligence with the hype around cryptocurrenciesGoogle’s chief artificial intelligence officer said Monday that the company will spend more than $100 billion over time to develop artificial intelligence technology.
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, talked about the technology giant’s investment in artificial intelligence during Monday’s TED conference in Vancouver, where he was asked about OpenAI and Microsoft’s reported plans for US-based data center called “Stargate” Bloomberg reported. The data center would house a supercomputer composed of millions of AI chips could cost up to $100 billionreports “The Information”, citing anonymous sources.
“We’re not talking about specific numbers, but I think we will invest more over time,” Hassabis said in response to a question about Stargate. Bloomberg reported that it did not provide further details about Google’s spending plans. Hassabis, who co-founded artificial intelligence startup DeepMind in 2010 before it was acquired by Google in 2014, reportedly added that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has better computing power than its rivals, including Microsoft.
“This is one of the reasons we partnered with Google in 2014. We knew we would need a lot of computing resources to achieve AGI,” Hassabis said. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the point at which artificial intelligence achieves human-level knowledge across a range of tasks. “Google had and still has the most computers,” Hassabis said.
In March, Hassabis told the Financial Times that the billions of dollars pumped into artificial intelligence resembled the hype surrounding cryptocurrencies, and they are a distraction from the “phenomenal” science and research behind its development.
Investing in artificial intelligence “carries a whole lot of hype and maybe a little bit of bragging rights,” he said, comparing it to cryptocurrencies and similar areas, adding that the sentiment “has now spilled over to artificial intelligence, which I think is a bit unfortunate.”
But Hassabis said he believes the industry is “only scratching the surface” of what’s possible. “We may be at the beginning of a fresh golden era of scientific discovery, a fresh renaissance,” he said.