Google’s top AI executive seeks the profound over profits and the “prosaic”
REUTERS
Google’s top AI executive seeks the profound over profits and the “prosaic”
With Hassabis now in greater control of Alphabet’s AI efforts, Google has rolled out an increasing array of AI offerings. That includes an improved chatbot and AI model, now known as Gemini, that enhances its search engine and tops some industry performance rankings.
A new AI photo editor, Nano Banana, attracted 13 million first-time users to the Gemini app in four days this September, allowing users to generate or edit images using photos, drawings or text prompts. The advances helped Alphabet’s share price reach an all-time high this month.
In public, Hassabis often avoids talk of money. Most industry leaders speak of the market applications of AI even as they also discuss its implications for humankind. Hassabis frames his quest in philosophical and cosmic terms, sometimes veering outright into science fiction.
“What I’ve always dreamed about,” Hassabis said in a 2022 podcast interview, is “the ultimate flourishing of humanity to travel the stars and find those aliens, if they are there.” With further advances, he added, AI could lead to “a world of radical abundance and curing diseases and solving many of the big challenges we have.”
Read more | REUTERS