Applying our 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 boy, I spent hours connecting resistors, capacitors and other electronic components with wires. First I would assemble a morse code circuit. Next, disassemble the circuit, reusing its wires and components to create a timer. And then disconnect the timer and make an amplifier. Analog electronics provided the perfect toolbox for creating and creating new minds like mine.
Soon I was designing processing chips at my first summer job at Marconi, the telecommunications giant. And that led to studying electronics and software at university, where, in lab days, we built circuit boards for radio receivers. Now, we have pocket computers and colossal data centers – all connected by light communications – running powerful software to benefit 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 step. When combined with human ingenuity and direction, AI could discover new solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges, at a speed and scale previously unimaginable.
Artificial intelligence is not hype – it is perhaps the ultimate 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 use AI to create useful products is a key focus of my work and life today. It’s often a topic of discussion in my external engagements with business leaders, product people and engineers – like my upcoming keynote at the AI Hardware Summit this week.
Remove the research from the lab
My main focus as CBO is to achieve cutting edge research breakthroughs and combine our technologies to solve everyday business problems. This intersection is incredibly exciting because in many cases, we are working in uncharted territory, introducing tools that promise to solve problems for billions of people around the world.
I’m often asked, as a forward-looking research organization, why is it important to work on global challenges that affect people every day? One of the things (but not the only thing!) that makes DeepMind so special is our ability to bridge leading AI research to hundreds, if not thousands, of AI problems that affect billions of people.
We’re building one of the largest libraries of AI solutions in the world, and our parent company, Alphabet, has an amazing market of problems to solve. Together, we’re able to focus on the toughest technical challenges with the biggest returns, creating useful products that help billions of people when they matter most.
For example, we’ve helped extend phone battery life for Android operating systems, used by over a billion people every day. This can be a lifesaver, especially in times of need. It has been one of the most universally requested problems to solve and will become increasingly important as we move to a cleaner, greener world.
One of the biggest challenges and opportunities of working in this space is finding ways to harness the potential of AI while ensuring that our work is safe, ethical and inclusive at every stage, from research and development to implementation and impact.
Over the past few years, we’ve gone from talking about the potential of our work to benefiting billions of people on a daily basis. And now we’re at the stage where we’re applying AI to Nobel-level problems in science and society.
To benefit people’s lives at scale
But with so much potential, where does one begin? To ensure that our work is implemented in the most efficient ways possible, we start by looking for key, transformative challenges that, if solved, could help address many other efficiencies across a wide range of problems.
One of the most prominent examples is AlphaFold, our AI system that can accurately predict protein structures, the building blocks of life. With this system, we helped solve this 50-year-old grand challenge in biology, which is now helping scientists around the world advance their work.
We are also working in areas such as sustainability, in particular looking at the ways in which artificial intelligence can help optimize energy production and consumption. For example, we created an artificial intelligence system that can control the plasma in the nuclear fusion process, which could lead to safer, cleaner energy production. We also helped reduce energy consumption in Google’s massive data centers, improving energy efficiency and reducing emissions. These developments are game-changers for how society manages and uses energy.
Similarly, MuZero has shown so much potential to save time and energy at scale. Originally built to promote gaming intelligence, it now helps improve the YouTube experience. Almost seven hundred thousand hours of content are viewed on YouTube every minute. That’s an amazing amount of web traffic. By optimizing the way videos are compressed, for example, we’ve reduced data and energy usage and helped increase access to video content around the world.
Looking to the future
AI is undoubtedly the most transformative technology of our time. This extraordinary promise also requires extraordinary care. Predicting the potential impact of a technology as pervasive and transformative as artificial intelligence is really difficult, and therefore careful consideration is necessary.
For this reason, we have devised a long-term scientific roadmap to help guide our research. And as we move forward on this journey, we’re constantly evaluating the long-term impact of our work to make sure it’s being developed in a safe and responsible way.
We need to have the smartest minds working carefully on things, step by step. This is too big, too important to move fast and break things, so pioneering responsibly is at the heart of everything we do.
It’s incredibly empowering to be able to really connect with the huge range of problems our work helps solve and the potential to have huge benefits for humanity, with our reach to billions of people around the world. For me, this combination is truly outstanding.