At the United Nations Summit of the Future, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced a $120 million ‘Global AI Opportunity Fund’. The fund aims at making AI learning and training accessible to communities around the world by partnering with nonprofits and NGOs to offer courses in local languages.
World Leaders converge for UNGA
The announcement was made during the 79th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York. Leaders from across the globe, including Pichai, participated in the event. The experience of growing up with new innovations such as computers in Chennai, India, was great for changing Pichai’s life. The experiences led him to work in life with a focus on making technology accessible to most people.
Google Commitment Expansion towards AI
Pichai said Google has been investing in AI research and infrastructure for two decades. The company has made several powerful tools much more robust, such as Google Translate: adding 110 more languages in the past year alone, now supporting 246 languages, and set an ambitious goal to support 1,000 languages worldwide.
Potential Economic Impact of AI
Studies indicate that AI will add 1.4 percent to the world’s labour productivity and increase world GDP by 7 percent within ten years. Pichai cited AI’s contributions to the improvement of operations and logistics, particularly in developing markets with challenges such as infrastructure and traffic congestion.
Mr. Pichai was very vocal about the responsible development and deployment of AI technologies. He spoke of Google’s AI Principles launched in 2018 and mentioned the collaborations by the company with industry partners, academic partners, and international institutions such as the UN, the Frontier Model Forum, and the G7 Hiroshima Process, to ensure proper AI development.
