Google’s Sundar Pichai Says AI Tech Moving Fast, Keeps Him Up At Night

In an interview broadcast on Sunday, CEO of Alphabet Inc. and Google Sundar Pichai said that the development in artificial intelligence (AI) space was happening very rapidly and it keeps him up at nights.

Emphasising that the technology was developing fast and could cause harm, Pichai called for government regulations.

“.. if deployed wrongly, it could be very harmful. And the technology is moving fast. So, does that keep me up at night? Absolutely,” he said during the 60 Minutes interview.

During the interview, Pichai also highlighted the issue of deepfake photos and videos generated with the help of AI. He said that the issue would require consequences in the future and called for laws to tackle them.

According to Sensity, 96 per cent of deepfakes are sexually explicit and feature women who didn’t consent to the creation of the content. In fact, deep fake porn industry seems to be thriving in plain sight and experts opine that deepfakes would be a major issue in future that could only be tackled in a cat-and-mouse game.

On his fears, Pichai said “At some point, does humanity lose control of the technology that is developing?”

Interestingly, Google is reportedly working fast to launch an AI-backed search engine and upgrading its existing one, which could potentially bring the power of AI to smartphones and devices soon, according to a New York Times report. The fresh features for the new search engine and existing one are being developed under project ‘Magi’. Google designers, engineers and executives are working on this search engine which is expected to offer users far more personalised experience than what’s offered currently.

Pichai also opined the there would be a need for AI frameworks in the near future when asked about how the technology will have to be looked upon from the global and country-perspective.

Google is currently playing a catchup game in the AI segment with its innovations as the wild popularity of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT has accumulated over a 100 million users in a few months’ time since its public rollout. Many feel that AI innovations from OpenAI and Microsoft could stand to threaten Google’s iron fist rule in the search engine segment.