Applying our AI research to help enrich the lives of billions of people around the world
Building useful products with new technologies has always been one of my greatest joys. As a boy, I would spend hours wiring resistors, capacitors, and other electronic components. First, I was putting together a Morse code circuit. Then disassemble the circuit, and reuse its wires and components to build a makeshift. Then disconnect the timer and make an amplifier. Analog electronic components provided the perfect toolkit for young minds, like mine, to build and create.
Soon I was designing processing chips for my first summer job at Marconi, the telecom giant. This led to studying electronics and software at the university, where, in our lab days, we would build circuit boards for radio receivers. Now, we have pocket-sized computers and massive data centers — all connected to fast connections — that run powerful software for the benefit of businesses, communities, and consumers around the world.
But it is artificial intelligence (AI) that holds humanity’s greatest potential. You learn the technique and iterate, with the ability to solve problems at every turn. When combined with human creativity and direction, AI can discover new solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges, at a speed and scale previously unimaginable.
AI isn’t hype – it’s probably 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 build useful products is the main focus of my work and life today. It’s often a topic of conversation in my external engagements with business leaders, product people, and engineers — like my upcoming keynote at the AI Hardware Summit this week.
Research output from the laboratory
My primary focus as a CBO is on realizing our cutting edge research breakthroughs and matching our technologies to solve everyday business problems. This intersection is so exciting because in many cases, we’re operating in uncharted territory, delivering tools that hold the promise of solving problems for billions of people around the world.
It is often asked, as a future-facing research organisation, 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 connect leading-edge AI research to hundreds, if not thousands, of AI-ready problems affecting billions of people.
We’ve built one of the largest libraries of AI solutions in the world, and our parent company, Alphabet, has an amazing market for problems to solve. Together, we’re able to focus on the toughest technology challenges with the biggest payoffs, creating useful products that help billions of people in the moments that matter.
For example, we helped extend the battery life of Android phones, which are used by more than 1 billion people every day. This can be a lifesaver, especially in times of need. It has been one of the most globally demanded problems to be solved, and its importance will only grow as we move to a cleaner, greener world.
One of the greatest challenges and opportunities for working in this field 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 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. We are now at the stage where we apply artificial intelligence to the Nobel Prize problems in science and society.
Benefit people’s lives widely
But with so much potential, where does one begin? To ensure that our work is applied in the most effective way possible, we start by looking for core and transformational challenges that, if solved, can help address many other competencies across a wide range of problems.
One of the most striking examples of this is AlphaFold, our AI system that can accurately predict protein structures, the building blocks of life. With this system, we helped solve this great 50-year-old challenge in biology, which is now helping scientists around the world advance their work.
We’ve also worked in areas such as sustainability, particularly looking at the ways AI can help improve energy production and consumption. For example, we have created an AI system that can control plasma in the process of nuclear fusion, which can lead to safer and cleaner energy production. We’ve also helped reduce energy consumption in Google’s massive data centers, improving energy efficiency and reducing emissions. These developments are game changers for how energy is managed and used in society.
Likewise, MuZero has shown a lot of potential for massive time and energy savings. It was initially created to improve gaming intelligence and now helps improve your YouTube experience. Almost seven hundred thousand hours of content is watched on YouTube every minute. This is an amazing amount of web traffic. By improving the ways we compress videos, for example, we’ve reduced data and energy usage and helped increase access to video content around the world.
Looking forward to the future
Artificial intelligence is without a doubt the most transformative technology of our time. This exceptional promise also requires exceptional care. Predicting the potential impacts of a general and transformative technology like AI is really hard, so careful study is essential.
For this reason, we have developed a long-term scientific roadmap to help guide our research. And as we go on this journey, we are constantly assessing the long-term impact of our work to ensure it is deployed in a safe and responsible manner.
We need the smartest minds working on things carefully, step by step. This is very big, very important to move fast and break things, which is why leading responsibly is at the heart of everything we do.
It’s incredibly inspiring to be able to truly connect with the wide range of problems our work helps solve, and the potential for tremendous benefits to humanity, through our reach to billions of people around the world. For me, this combination is really cool.