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Google’s quantum bet on the future of AI—and what it means for humanity - Fast Company
Google has more computing power, data, and talent to pursue artificial intelligence than any other company on Earth—and it’s not slowing down. That’s why humans can’t, either.
The human brain is a funny thing. Certain memories can stick with us forever: the birth of a child, a car crash, an election day. But we only store some details—the color of the hospital delivery room or the smell of the polling station—while others fade, such as the face of the nurse when that child was born, or what we were wearing during that accident. For Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the day he watched AI rise out of a lab is one he’ll remember forever.
“This was 2012, in a room with a small team, and there were just a few of us,” he tells me. An engineer named Jeff Dean, a legendary programmer at Google who helped build its search engine, had been working on a new project and wanted Pichai to have a look. “Anytime Jeff wants to update you on something, you just get excited by it,” he says.
Pichai doesn’t recall exactly which building he was in when Dean presented his work, though odd details of that day have stuck with him. He remembers standing, rather than sitting, and someone joking about an HR snafu that had designated the newly hired Geoffrey Hinton—the “Father of Deep Learning,” an AI researcher for four decades, and, later, a Turing Award winner—as an intern.
Google has more computing power, data, and talent to pursue artificial intelligence than any other company on Earth—and it’s not slowing down. That’s why humans can’t, either.
The human brain is a funny thing. Certain memories can stick with us forever: the birth of a child, a car crash, an election day. But we only store some details—the color of the hospital delivery room or the smell of the polling station—while others fade, such as the face of the nurse when that child was born, or what we were wearing during that accident. For Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the day he watched AI rise out of a lab is one he’ll remember forever.
“This was 2012, in a room with a small team, and there were just a few of us,” he tells me. An engineer named Jeff Dean, a legendary programmer at Google who helped build its search engine, had been working on a new project and wanted Pichai to have a look. “Anytime Jeff wants to update you on something, you just get excited by it,” he says.
Pichai doesn’t recall exactly which building he was in when Dean presented his work, though odd details of that day have stuck with him. He remembers standing, rather than sitting, and someone joking about an HR snafu that had designated the newly hired Geoffrey Hinton—the “Father of Deep Learning,” an AI researcher for four decades, and, later, a Turing Award winner—as an intern.