TECH NEWS – The CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, believes that artificial intelligence will not replace the jobs of programmers, despite advances in AI.

Speaking at Carnegie Mellon’s Pittsburgh campus, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, said that not only is Microsoft thinking about smaller, modular reactors, but they too are investing in alternative energy sources to provide clean, carbon-free power for their high-capacity hardware (i.e., the data centers that power artificial intelligence). According to Pichai, AI should be treated as a collaborative tool, not a competitor to human intelligence.

Pichai says there are many areas where the question of whether AI can replace entry-level workers could be asked, and it could also be asked about programmers: “The most likely scenario in all of these things is that it will help people. It’s going to help both existing programmers do their jobs, where most of their energy and time is going into, you know, higher aspects of the task. Rather than, you know, fixing a bug over and over again or something like that,” Pichai said. With Cursor AI, the AI-powered code editor, the barrier for programmers to interact with natural language has come down, making programming much more of a creative tool and therefore more accessible to more people.

Google has been carbon neutral since 2007, and Pichai says his company was one of the first to do so. By 2030, they want to achieve it in all of their operations, 24 hours a day, although they mentioned this goal before the advent of artificial intelligence. According to Pichai, they are working on more than 1 GW (gigawatt = 1 billion watts!) of data centers, something he could not have imagined two years ago. And these need energy, which is a challenge in the short term, but more optimistic in the medium and long term, as energy needs lead to investments in the development of new energy sources.

Google is a leader in investing in clean energy, and most of its data centers are already about 90% carbon neutral. Their server in Nevada is powered by geothermal energy, and while the upfront training of artificial intelligence is fairly uneconomical, Pichai believes they can become dramatically more efficient on the inference side over time. Of course, that will take some time!

Source: WCCFTech