DeepMind’s CEO said Google will spend more than $100 billion on AI

Google’s AI chief executive said Monday that the company will spend more than $100 billion over time to develop AI technology. He said this after comparing the billions of dollars spent on AI development to the hype surrounding crypto.

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, talked about the tech giant’s investment in AI at a TED conference in Vancouver on Monday. He was also asked about OpenAI and Microsoft’s rumoured plans for a “Stargate” data centre in the United States. Unnamed sources told The Information that the data centre, which would hold a supercomputer made of millions of AI chips, could cost as much as $100 billion.

When asked about Stargate, Hassabis said, “We don’t talk about our exact numbers, but I think we’re investing more than that over time.”  He didn’t give any more information about Google’s spending plans. Hassabis co-founded the AI startup DeepMind in 2010 and helped Google buy it in 2014. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, reportedly boasts more computing power than its competitors, including Microsoft.

“That’s one reason we teamed up with Google in 2014, we knew we would need a lot of computing power to get to AGI,” Hassabis said. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) occurs when AI reaches a level where it can perform a wide range of tasks on par with humans. Hadsabis said, “Google had the most computers and still does.”

Hassabis said in March that the billions of dollars being poured into AI are like the hype around cryptocurrencies and are drawing attention away from the “phenomenal” science and research that is making it possible.

He said that investing in AI “brings with it a whole bunch of hype and maybe some grifting,” like in crypto and other similar fields. He also said that the feeling “has now spilled over into AI, which I think is a bit unfortunate.”