At a TED Conference in Vancouver earlier this week, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind stated that the company will spend over $100 billion over a period of time to develop AI technology. Hassabis commented on the company’s spending after being asked about OpenAI and Microsoft’s plans to build ‘Stargate’, a US-based data centre. Reportedly, the data centre would house a supercomputer comprising millions of AI chips and could also cost up to $100 billion.
Hassabis added that while Google does not discuss its specific numbers, it will invest more over time. He co-founded DeepMind with Mustafa Suleyman in 2010. The company was acquired by Google in 2014. Hassabis also added that currently, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has better computing power than its rivals.
Hassabis explained it was one of the reasons they teamed up with Google in 2014: they knew that to get Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), they needed a lot to compute. AGI is the point at which AI reaches human-level knowledge across various tasks.
However, the founder also added that the industry currently is only scratching the surface of what is possible.
