Google’s AI chief: “I am definitely not worried about the AI apocalypse”
John Giannandrea, the AI chief from Google, had many great things to say about artificial intelligence at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. He has spoken out about what he feels are misconceptions and overstated dangers surrounding intelligent machines. In particular, he thinks that people are too scared about general purpose artificial intelligence.
A few years ago, Giannandrea compared artificial intelligence to a 4-year-old child. Today, he revised his statement and said that it’s even worse than that. “They’re not nearly as general purpose as a 4-year-old child,” he said.
Machine instead of artificial intelligence
“I think there’s a huge amount of hype around AI right now. There’s a lot of people that are unreasonably concerned around the rise of general AI,” Giannandrea said. “Machine learning and artificial intelligence are extremely important and will revolutionize our industry. What we’re doing is building tools like the Google search engine and making you more productive.”
He specifically refers to artificial intelligence that is not developed for a specific purpose, but which can solve different tasks based on the same thinking process – just like the human brain.
In principle, says Giannandrea, he likes to avoid the term artificial intelligence: “it’s kind of like big data,” he said. “It’s such a broad term, it’s really not well defined. I’ve been trying to use the term machine intelligence.”
A.I. Apocalypse: More Myth Than Reality
“I’m definitely not afraid of an AI apocalypse,” says Giannandrea. He strictly contradicts the hype and statements “made by some people”. Although he avoided to name the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who recently warned repeatedly of the dangers of artificial intelligence and even demanded an early regulation by US policy, many have inferred this connection.
Giannandrea also defends himself against accusations that Google and other large tech companies dominated the AI market because of the easy access to many records. If for AI these data are like dumbbells, with which they train and optimize their performance, then Google should have the heaviest weights.
Giannandrea asserts: “You don’t need quite as much data as you think you do. There are large data sets that are open”. Company is looking for an open dialogue with the AI industry, even internally, Google has academic researchers working with engineers. “We have a very close relationship between researchers and product developers,” Giannandrea said.