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Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai shared his thoughts on whether AI will replace entry-level programmers and the role of clean energy when it comes to powering the massive data centers needed to power artificial intelligence software. Pichai made his comments at Carnegie Mellon University’s Pittsburgh campus earlier this week, where he shared that Google has been powering its data centers with geothermal energy to reduce its carbon footprint.
Alphabet and Google leaders acknowledged the growing interest in small modular reactors (SMRs) for nuclear energy, and said capital investment is flowing into developing alternative energy sources to power computing facilities cleanly. They added that AI should be seen more as a collaborative tool, rather than a comparative element competing with human intelligence.
Google CEO Says AI Training Is Inefficient While Inference Has Potential To Be Very Efficient
In his talk, when asked by students whether AI will replace entry-level programmers, Pichai began by stating that “there are versions of this question that can be asked across disciplines.” He believes that “The most likely scenario in all of this is, it’s going to help people. It’s going to help existing programmers to do their jobs, where most of their energy and time is spent on, you know, the higher-level aspects of the task. Rather than you know fixing bugs over and over again or something like that, right.“
Pichai has seen increased efficiency at Google, and citing the power of AI code editor Cursor AI, he shared, “It just lowers the barriers for those who can program, right, like how you can interact in a natural language medium. So programming becomes more of a creative tool. I think that’s going to make it more accessible to a lot more people.“.”
He outlined AI’s ability to assist many professionals in their day-to-day activities as the ‘right lens’ to view AI, adding that “The phrase artificial intelligence is not beneficial. It creates a kind of comparative element. It doesn’t need to be like that.“He believes a better term is “activate intelligence,” and ” histhe bet is that more people will pursue programming in the future.“
When asked about energy-intensive AI and Google’s approach, Pichai replied that Google has been carbon neutral since 2007 and added that the company was one of the first to achieve that goal. He explained that “we set an ambitious goal to be completely carbon neutral in our operations 24/7“by 2030. However, Google had set this goal before the current surge in AI training it is experiencing, the executive explained.
As part of its operational enhancements, “We are now working on data centers with capacities of over 1 gigawatt which I don’t think we would have thought of two years ago.,” Pichai explained. He stated that “all this requires energy,” which is a challenge in the short term. However, he is more optimistic about the long to medium term because the surge in energy demand for data centers is “also brings a lot of capital investment to, you know, develop new energy sources.“.”
Google is leading the way in investing in clean energy, Pichai explained, which has led to “many of our largest data centers operate[ing] about 90% carbon free“Google’s Nevada data center is powered by geothermal energy, and increasing capital investment is also visible”money goes into SMRs, uh, you know, small modular reactors for nuclear energy,” he added.
This interest makes Pichai optimistic about data center energy consumption in the medium to long term. This is mainly because even though AI pre-training is quite inefficient, he thinks ““On the inference side, I think we can get a lot more efficient as time goes on.”