As one of the global leaders in AI, Google is willing to continue participating in and leading this golden age of AI innovation.

Author: AIGC Open Community

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At 3 AM today, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, delivered an important speech at the global AI summit being held in Paris, France—now is the golden age of AI innovation.

Pichai believes that AI technology is experiencing rapid advancements, with a significant decrease in costs. In the past 18 months, the cost of processing tokens has dropped from $4 per million to 13 cents, a decrease of up to 97%.

In the field of science, AI has also made significant breakthroughs. For example, Google's protein model AlphaFold has helped over 2.5 million researchers worldwide develop new malaria vaccines and cancer treatments. Google has also made important progress in quantum computing, with its latest Willow quantum chip solving a problem that would take a classical computer a billion trillion years to solve in less than five minutes.

From defeating top human Go players with AlphaGo Zero, to the protein model AlphaFold, and the Transformer that changed the trajectory of AI globally, Google, as one of the global leaders in AI, is willing to continue participating in and leading this golden age of AI innovation.

Here is the original text from Pichai:

Dear leaders and guests, I am very pleased to gather with you today.

President Macron, thank you for your invitation and for bringing together such an outstanding group of people here.

AI is a once-in-a-lifetime technology. Discussions focused on collaboration and concrete actions, like today, will drive this work forward.

Today, I want to share some examples to explain why I am so optimistic about AI and its applications, and how we have the opportunity to benefit every person around the world.

For me, improving lives through technology is a personal matter.

I grew up in Chennai, India. It took a long time for each new technology to enter our lives, including rotary phones. We were on a five-year waiting list. When the phone was finally installed at home, it changed our lives.

Previously, to help my mother get blood test results, I had to travel back and forth for four hours. Sometimes I would rush to the hospital only to be told, "It's not ready yet, come back tomorrow." Now, we can just make a phone call to resolve it.

I have witnessed how technology can have a positive impact and make life better. This set me on a path that first took me to the United States and eventually to join a startup that was still growing—Google.

At that time, I could not have imagined that one day I would raise a glass to celebrate three of my Google colleagues winning the Nobel Prize in just a few weeks, or that I would take my parents for a ride in a self-driving car. All of this is thanks to another technology: AI.

We are still in the early stages of AI development, but I firmly believe that AI will bring about the most profound changes of our lifetime.

Its impact will be greater than the proliferation of personal computers and the rise of the mobile internet. Moreover, compared to the internet, it will play a larger role in facilitating the dissemination of information.

In the past 18 months, the cost for developers to process a token has decreased by 97%. It used to cost $4 to process one million tokens, and now it only costs 13 cents, and I expect this trend to continue.

The result is that intelligence is more accessible and widespread than ever before.

So, we are currently experiencing a platform transformation. But what makes it so significant? There are several aspects:

As interactions with AI become more intuitive and humanized, it places us at the center of the experience. Technology begins to feel like a natural extension of our bodies, enhancing human capabilities, bridging gaps in expertise and experience, and breaking down barriers in language and accessibility.

As a truly universal technology, AI is applicable to many human activities and various sectors of the economy. Every company, every industry, including the public sector, will apply this technology in its own way.

As AI continues to evolve, it will stimulate innovation, opportunities, and growth in the global economy, driving explosive growth in knowledge, learning, creativity, and productivity, shaping the future in exciting ways.

The opportunities brought by AI are immense. And everyone here has the responsibility to ensure that as many people as possible benefit from it.

Reasons for Google's Investment in AI

The opportunity to improve lives and transform the world is why Google has been investing in AI for over a decade. Because we believe this is the most important way to advance our mission of organizing the world's information to make it universally accessible and useful.

Looking back at the significant breakthroughs in AI over the past decade, our researchers have played a crucial role. From key language understanding technologies to AI that defeated the world's top Go players, to the Transformer architecture, which is the foundation of today's generative AI revolution, powering the most advanced AI models.

We are constantly exploring the frontier. Our team's papers on generative AI are cited three times more than those from any other company or educational institution in the world.

Advancing this field means building infrastructure. This includes our network, which consists of over 2 million miles of land and undersea fiber optic cables. We also have dedicated chips for AI, known as Tensor Processing Units, which have now reached their sixth generation. In just the past two generations, we have tripled their carbon efficiency.

This infrastructure has supported the development of cutting-edge models like Gemini, which has made breakthroughs in processing multimodal information such as text, images, video, audio, and code, while also possessing long text processing and agent capabilities.

Our infrastructure also enables us to provide these cutting-edge technologies to developers, entrepreneurs, and businesses.

Finally, we are developing various applications to truly help people around the world with AI. We currently have seven products with over 2 billion users, such as Google Maps, Google Search, and the Android system. They all benefit from our AI innovations and the latest Gemini model.

All of this together forms our unique full-stack innovation model, bringing new experiences.

How AI Brings New Experiences

I am very excited about some of the experiences that AI brings, including deep research and thinking capabilities. They help people conduct in-depth research on specific topics, like having a personal research assistant that can search for information online, analyze data, and summarize key findings.

I know many of you are starting to think about summer plans.

You can ask a deep research agent: "Where should I go in Europe for a two-week vacation in August?" Five minutes later, you will receive a comprehensive analysis that considers costs, weather, visa requirements, and all information is cited. Moreover, the speed of information retrieval is constantly increasing.

Or, if you don't want to search the internet but want the model to extract information only from specific documents you provide, that's the magic of NotebookLM. You can imagine turning a pile of obscure documents into an engaging podcast. In just three months, people have generated over 350 years' worth of audio summaries through it. Businesses are using it to create a centralized knowledge base, like an internal expert capable of answering questions about policies, processes, customers, and more.

As models become increasingly multimodal, their understanding of the surrounding world also strengthens. You just need to point your phone camera at an object nearby and ask Project Astra.

What is truly exciting is that Project Astra brings us one step closer to realizing the vision of a universal AI assistant that can seamlessly integrate into our lives across different devices and scenarios. We will soon apply similar capabilities to our products.

How AI Supports Scientific Discovery

These are some examples of how people and businesses are currently using AI.

But in the fields of science and exploration, some of the results brought by AI are the most exciting.

A powerful example is AlphaFold, which has made significant breakthroughs in predicting the complex structures of proteins. The Nobel Prize celebration I mentioned earlier is a direct reflection of the research results from Demis and John of DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google. Demis, or should I call him Sir Demis, is also here today; let’s give him a round of applause.

In 2021, we made AlphaFold freely available to the scientific community. Today, over 2.5 million researchers from more than 190 countries are using it to develop new malaria vaccines, cancer treatments, and even enzymes for biodegradable plastics. We estimate that AlphaFold has saved hundreds of thousands of research hours.

Isomorphic Labs, a company under Google's parent company Alphabet, is using machine learning based on AlphaFold's results in drug design to improve the success rate of treatment plans while shortening development time and reducing costs. Moreover, we have many partners worldwide who are using our cloud technology to carry out similar work, such as the French company Servier.

Quantum computing will also help scientists discover new drugs, design more efficient batteries for electric vehicles, and accelerate research progress in nuclear fusion and new energy fields.

This is the next major paradigm shift in computing after AI. We have also made good progress in this area.

Last December, we achieved a breakthrough. Our advanced Willow quantum chip completed a computational task in less than five minutes, while a traditional computer would take 10 to the 25th power years (which is 1 followed by 25 zeros, a time span many times longer than the existence of the universe).

And even as the number of quantum chips increases, the errors in computation are decreasing. By the way, AI has played a role in this as well. We will continue to make progress on the path to a fully error-corrected quantum computer.

Now, let me share a real-world example: fully autonomous vehicles.

After years of technological research and promotion, the recent advancements in autonomous vehicles are astonishing.

In 2024, Waymo will operate in four cities, providing over 4 million rides to passengers.

Recently, one of those rides took my parents and me to a park near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

Clearly, I had previously ridden in Waymo's autonomous vehicles, but seeing my father, who is over 80 years old, gave me a new appreciation for the advancements in this technology.

How AI Benefits Society

There are many examples of how AI benefits society. One example is expanding access to information through language.

When Google Translate was first launched, its model relied on widely available language data on the internet. However, this was not the case for most languages in the world, especially in places like Africa.

Last year, we used AI technology to add over 110 languages to Google Translate, which are used by 500 million people globally. This brings the total number of languages we support to 249, including 60 African languages. More will come in the future.

Another area full of tremendous opportunities is healthcare.

In Paris, we are excited to collaborate with the Curie Institute to combine their world-class research with our cutting-edge AI technology. Our goal is to improve treatment outcomes for women suffering from various rare and deadly cancers, including identifying predictive biomarkers for certain uterine cancers and more accurately predicting breast cancer patients' responses to specific treatment plans. We are honored to work with the Curie Institute.

In India and Thailand, we have partnered with local organizations to conduct 6 million AI screenings for diabetic retinopathy (a preventable cause of blindness), all free for patients.

Beyond healthcare, AI is also improving how communities respond to natural disasters.

Our AI-based FloodHub flood prediction system currently covers over 100 countries and more than 700 million people, providing local communities with warnings up to seven days in advance, even in data-scarce areas.

We are also using AI to map the boundaries of large wildfires in 27 countries, providing accurate information to people. In the past year, this service has reached 30 million people, helping them evacuate safely during the recent wildfires in Los Angeles.

Our new satellite technology, FireSat, will provide us with even more powerful tools. It uses advanced sensors and high-resolution images to detect fire sources as small as 5×5 meters. This will bring significant changes to the work of firefighters.

From all these examples, I hope you can see the immense potential of AI in benefiting humanity, promoting economic development, advancing scientific progress, and addressing major human challenges.

However, these beneficial outcomes do not happen automatically, nor are they guaranteed.

It requires all of us to work together in multiple areas.

Ways to Unlock AI's Potential

Let me be specific about how to do this.

First, we must build an ecosystem composed of innovators and adopters.

I previously mentioned France's evolving innovation ecosystem; how can we create such innovation hubs in more places?

As Mario Draghi pointed out in his recent report, Europe's productivity depends on the application of these emerging technologies, and Europe's competitiveness depends on productivity. Therefore, promoting the application of technology is key to significantly enhancing productivity across the entire economy.

The second is infrastructure. We are encouraged by the paths opened by President Trump, President Macron, and other countries in this regard. Just this year, major tech companies have committed to investing $300 billion in capital expenditures.

Last week, we announced that we expect our capital expenditures to be around $75 billion in 2025.

Third, we must invest in talent to help people prepare for the future workforce.

I saw a report from the World Economic Forum this year estimating that most jobs in Europe will soon be enhanced by generative AI, with 7% of jobs facing automation. A report from the International Labour Organization (ILO) indicates that the positive effects of AI will be six times greater than the potential displacement effects.

We want to help the future workforce adapt to these realities.

Over the past decade, the "Google Growth Program" has helped 100 million people worldwide improve their digital skills. Now, we have established a $120 million global AI opportunity fund dedicated to providing AI education and training in communities around the world. We will cover 20,000 people across 24 countries in Europe.

Fourth, we must act boldly to advance the most transformative applications of AI while ensuring that it is done responsibly, allowing everyone to benefit.

This means addressing the limitations of technology, such as issues of accuracy and authenticity, and tackling the risks of misuse and abuse, such as those posed by deepfake technology.

AI also brings new complexities, such as its impact on future employment, energy demands, and the digital divide.

I often think about how fortunate I am to have access to technology, even though the process was somewhat slow.

But not everyone has that opportunity.

With AI, we have the chance to democratize technology applications from the start, ensuring that the digital divide does not evolve into an AI divide, allowing AI to help everyone.

The Important Role of Public Policy in AI

Public policy will play a crucial role in the four areas mentioned above.

Successful policies should have the following characteristics:

They should address risks without hindering innovation, progress, and positive impacts.

They should draw on existing laws and fill gaps rather than creating entirely new laws on a large scale.

Policies across countries should be consistent. If the regulatory environment is fragmented, with different rules in different countries and regions, AI cannot thrive.

Finally, governments need to adopt thoughtful strategic approaches to AI, promoting investments in infrastructure, talent development, and technology applications, with active government participation.

This is an important historical moment.

I believe that when future generations look back on this period, they will see it as the beginning of a golden age of innovation.

But these outcomes are not set in stone.

The greatest risk may be missing the opportunity.

Every generation worries that new technologies will make life worse for the next generation, but the reality is often quite the opposite.

When I was a child, I used logarithm tables to solve math problems, and I found it a bit strange to see children learning math on smartphones. But they are doing very well now.

We cannot let entrenched views of the present hinder future development. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to use AI to improve people's lives.

Let us do our utmost to seize this opportunity.

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