Despite the heightened tension around AI's risks, the tech may actually be starting to live up to some of AI leaders' grandiose predictions.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Google announced that its tech now supports more than 300 languages, spoken by 7 billion people, representing around 86% of the global population.
This, however, comes on the heels of a number of significant breakthroughs, including unveiling and releasing AlphaGenome Atlas, a map of all 9 billion possible single letter genetic changes across the human genome, releasing WeatherNext 3, its most accurate global weather model yet, and creating the Planetary Prediction Engine to forecast and prepare for what it calls "planetary crises," such as disease outbreaks.
"We’re focusing our work in key areas that matter most: making disease detectable, treatable, and preventable, predicting natural disasters, expanding learning, and unlocking economic opportunities for more people," James Manyika, SVP of research, labs, technology and society at Google, wrote in the post.
In these areas, Google laid out several other initiatives to use AI for the benefit of humanity, including:
- Using the tech to study breast cancer, tuberculosis and diabetes, as well as expanding wearables to detect things like cardiovascular diseases, insulin resistance and hypertension
- Tracking and predicting extreme weather or natural disasters, such as monsoons, wildfires, earthquakes and floods, to prepare for and mitigate as much damage as possible
- Using AI to democratize education through personalized learning and removing language barriers, and broadly creating better translation tools and more inclusive speech technology
Our Deeper View #
There is a lot of doom and gloom around AI right now as the risks of the tech heighten anxiety around all of the ways it can be used for malice. And that risk isn't unwarranted, as we've recently seen warnings that frontier labs are having to thwart attempts to use the tech to create bioweapons. But we should always remember that AI is simply a very powerful tool that can be used for good or bad. Amid the current fear, the good is often being overshadowed. And while Google's initiatives certainly serve as good PR, both for the benefits of AI and for itself, they do serve as a reminder that, when it's in the right hands, AI can clearly be used to benefit humanity. And for a company like Google that's struggling to keep up with frontier labs in creating the most powerful models, focusing on ways to maximize the human benefits looks to be a solid strategy.