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

THE chief of Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) business said that over time the company will spend more than US$100 billion developing AI 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 (Apr 15) about a potential US$100 billion supercomputer dubbed “Stargate”, being planned by Microsoft and OpenAI, according to a report in the Information last month.

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

“That is 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 is 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. BLOOMBERG

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