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Google parent Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai shared his thoughts on whether AI will replace entry level programmers and about the role clean energy can play when it comes to powering the massive data centers required to power artificial intelligence software. Pichai made his comments at the Carnegie Mellon University’s Pittsburgh campus earlier this week, as he shared that Google has powered up its data centers with geothermal energy to reduce their carbon footprint.
The Alphabet and Google head acknowledged the growing interest in small modular reactors (SMRs) for nuclear energy, sharing that capital investment was flowing into developing alternate energy sources to cleanly power computing facilities. He added that AI should be viewed more as a collaborative tool instead of a comparative element that competes with human intelligence.
Google CEO Shares That AI Training Is Inefficient While Inference Has The Potential For High Efficiency
During his talk, when asked by students whether AI would replace entry level programmers, Pichai started out by stating that “there’s a version of this question which can be asked across many disciplines.” He believes that “the most likely scenario in all of these things is, it will help people. It’ll both help 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, right.“
Pichai has already experienced the efficiency gains at Google, and citing the AI power code editor Cursor AI, he shared, “It is just lowering the barriers for who can program, right, like how can you, more, in a natural language medium, interact. So, programming becomes more like a creative tool. I think that’s gonna enable and make it accessible to more people.”
He outlined the ability of AI to assist numerous professionals in their daily activities as the ‘right lens’ to view AI, adding that “the phrase artificial intelligence is unfortunate. It creates this kind of a comparative element. It doesn’t need to be that.” He believes a better term would be “enabling intelligence,” and his “bet is many more people will be programming in the future.“
When asked about AI requiring copious amounts of energy and Google’s approach, Pichai replied that Google has been carbon neutral since 2007 and added that the firm was one of the first firms to have achieved the objective. He explained that “we set ourselves an ambitious goal to be completely carbon free in our operations 24/7” by 2030. However, Google had set this goal before the surge in AI training that its experiencing these days, explained the executive.
As part of its scaling up operations, “we are now working on over 1 gigawatt data centers which I didn’t think we would be thinking about just uh two years earlier,” outlined Pichai. He stated that “all of this needs energy,” which is challenging in the short term. However, he is more optimistic about the long to medium term because the surge in demand for energy to power data centers is “also bringing a lot of capital investment to, you know, developing new sources of energy.”
Google took the lead in investing in clean energy, explained Pichai, which has led to “many of our biggest data centers operat[ing] at around 90% carbon free basis.” Google’s Nevada data center is being powered by geothermal energy, and the growing capital investment is also seeing “money going into SMRs, uh, you know, this small modular reactors for nuclear energy,” he added.
This interest makes Pichai optimistic about the medium to long term for data center energy consumption. This is especially as while the AI pre training is quite inefficient, he thinks “on the inference side, I think we can get dramatically more efficient over time.”