Google To Invest Over $100 Billion On AI Says DeepMind’s CEO While Medium Bans AI Generated Content

The race in the artificial intelligence (AI) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) sector has been heating up with the biggest AI companies and promising startups making big moves in the last few weeks.

From Intel challenging NVIDIA with a new chip and an open system to Microsoft announcing a new AI hub in London to improve AI infrastructure, talent and expertise in the UK and OpenAI launching a custom Japanese GPT-4 model along with a new office in Tokyo, the AI sector is buzzing with the top players investing big.

Especially considering how the entire business world is focused on integrating the technology across their processes and workflows to boost productivity, responsiveness and cost-effective methods.

To further propel is capabilities and capture the AI market, Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly planning to build a $100 billion data center and AI supercomputer dubbed “Stargate”, expected to launch in 2028.

However, the large amount doesn’t seem to faze the CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, who spoke about Google’s future AI plan.

So, what did the CEO reveal? Let’s explore!
 

What Did Google DeepMind’s CEO Say?

 

• At a TED conference Google DeepMind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis, was asked his thoughts about the reported Microsoft-OpenAI $100 billion supercomputer project “Stargate”.

• Hassabis replied by saying, “We don’t talk about our specific numbers, but I think we’re investing more than that over time.”

• While the CEO didn’t provide further details on how the company plans to spend the $100+ billion in AI, he did go on to say, “That’s one of the reasons we teamed up with Google back in 2014, is we knew that in order to get to AGI we would need a lot of compute,” adding, “That’s what’s transpired ... And Google had and still has the most computers.”

• AGI refers to Artificial General Intelligence, which is a type of AI that can perform as good as or better than humans on a variety of tasks, with the ability to self-teach.

• Ahead of this, Hassabis said Alphabet (Google’s parent company) possessed superior computing power to Microsoft, a technology vital to the development of AGI.

• While Demis Hassabis, the chief of Google’s AI business, co-founded DeepMind in 2010 (before it was acquired by Google in 2014), another original co-founder of DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman leads the charge at Microsoft, with the title of EVP and CEO for Microsoft AI.

• Hassabis also believes the public is ready for AI systems, owing to the global interest sparked by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, despite the errors present in the system.

• Earlier in the month, Hassabis compared the billions of dollars being poured into the AI sector like that of the crypto industry, saying such large investments into AI companies produces a "bunch of hype and maybe some grifting and some other things that you see in other hyped-up areas, crypto or whatever.”

• The CEO further said the hype could distract from key innovations in the industry, saying, “It clouds the science and the research, which is phenomenal ... In a way, AI's not hyped enough, but in some senses it's too hyped."

On the other hand, AI-generated content is facing barricades from online publishing platform Medium as well as Google.
 

What Are The Obstacles Being Brought In By Medium And Google?

 

• On April 9, Google made an announcement to its Merchant Center product data specification by introducing new requirements for AI-generated content, which read, “We’re adding new attributes that will require merchants to disclose text content that was created using generative AI.”

• As per the release, the changes were to be brought into effect immediately, i.e. April 9, 2024.

• A day later (April 10), Medium updated its AI policy, which mentioned the platform was banning AI-generated content from its paid Partner program, which would go into effect on May 1, 2024.

• Furthermore, accounts with fully AI-generated content could have their stories removed from the paywall or could face being removed from the program completely.

• The move of updating the AI policy was notified to users via email, which read, “We are writing to notify you of policy updates that may impact your participation in the Medium Partner Program.”

• [Contd.] “Medium is for human storytelling, not AI-generated writing.”

• [Contd.] “Beginning May 1, 2024, stories with AI-generated writing (disclosed as such or not) are not allowed to be paywalled as part of our Partner Program.”

• Furthermore, users can be revoked from the Partner Program for “posting a high volume of stories that are AI-generated or other forms of low-quality content.”

Do you think the money being poured into the AI sector by tech conglomerates is adding to the hype of AI or do you think the investments are justified? Do you think Medium and Google are right in bringing restrictions to AI-generated content on their platforms?

Let us know in the comments below!