Excerpts On AI From Google's Blow-Out Q4 2020 Earnings Call
Sundar Pichai
Across the Alphabet portfolio, our investments in AI continue to drive progress. For example, DeepMind's AI part protein-folding breakthrough will enable researchers to tackle new and difficult problems, from fighting diseases to environmental sustainability. Google has partnership with Mayo Clinic in developing AI systems that can help plan radiotherapy treatments. Waymo is now providing hundreds of fully autonomous rides per week and recently partnered with Daimler trucks to develop fully autonomous trucks.
And our next question comes from Stephen Ju from Crédit Suisse.
Stephen Ju
So Sundar, I think let's -- I think you've recently talked about a 10- to 20-year journey for AI and quantum computing to unlock new use cases. I think you brought up in the past some of the ways AI is helping you with the products that you have in market right now. But as we take a more longer-term look into the future, what do you think some of the new applications could be?
Sundar Pichai
Thanks, Stephen. I'll answer the AI part first. We've always wanted to be foundational in how we approach technological advances, and that's the core competency. We invest across the company. We're one of the largest R&D investors in the world. And obviously, AI is a big part of it. Just I'm really excited that we -- over the past few years, while we have made progress in understanding different modalities, be it text, images, voice, vision, et cetera, there is -- we definitely -- I think we are at an inflection point, and we are investing to build better models and deepen our understanding and do it in a more generalized way. And when we do that, it will apply horizontally across our products.
You saw a version of that when we shipped Bird in Search in what was one of our biggest quality improvements, but you'll see that flow across be it Google Search, YouTube, Android as well as our investments in Alphabet, be it self-driving cars or robotics. So we take that view and, definitely, we want to make sure we are driving state-of-the-art progress. |
