Sundar Pichai Feels AI May Be A Bigger Disruptor For Humanity Than ‘Fire’ And Electricity

In an interview broadcast on Sunday, CEO of Alphabet Inc. and Google Sundar Pichai said he believes artificial intelligence (AI) technology could be the bigger than the advent of fire and electricity for the humanity.

Speaking on AI, he said, “The technology will be far more capable of anything seen before.”

When asked about the state of AI technology today, he said he wouldn’t read too much into where the technology is today but emphasised that the technology would needs government regulations.

He said AI will be one of the critical technologies that will impact national security of nations all over the world. “But over time, (this) technology will be available to most countries,” Pichai added.

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

“.. 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.

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.

The search engine giant is essentially playing a catchup game in the AI segment with its innovations as the wild popularity of OpenAI’s AI 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 threaten Google’s iron fist rule in the ‘search engine’ segment.

According to the latest report by Goldman Sachs Research, Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) could contribute as much as 7 per cent or about USD 7 trillion to the global GDP over the next 10 years. The technology is also projected to lift productivity growth by 1.5 percentage points over this period.

Meanwhile, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has predicted that AI could contribute as much as USD 10 trillion to the global GDP by 2030.