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Google sent a jolt of unease<\/a> into the climate change debate this month when it disclosed that emissions from its data centers rose 13% in 2023, citing the \u201cAI transition\u201d in its annual environmental report<\/a>. But according to Jeff Dean, Google\u2019s chief scientist, the report doesn\u2019t tell the full story and gives AI more than its fair share of blame.<\/p>\n Dean, who is chief scientist at both Google<\/a> DeepMind<\/a> and Google Research, said that Google is not backing off its commitment to be powered by 100% clean energy by the end of 2030. But, he said, that progress is \u201cnot necessarily a linear thing\u201d because some of Google\u2019s work with clean energy providers will not come on line until several years from now.<\/p>\n \u201cThose things will provide significant jumps in the percentage of our energy that is carbon-free energy, but we also want to focus on making our systems as efficient as possible,\u201d Dean said at Fortune\u2019s Brainstorm Tech conference on Tuesday, in an onstage interview with Fortune\u2019s AI editor Jeremy Kahn.<\/p>\n Dean went on to make the larger point that AI is not as responsible for increasing data center usage, and thus carbon emissions, as critics make it out to be. <\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of focus on the increasing energy usage of AI, and from a very small base that usage is definitely increasing,\u201d Dean said. \u201cBut I think people often conflate that with overall data center usage \u2014 of which AI is a very small portion right now but growing fast \u2014 and then attribute the growth rate of AI based computing to the overall data center usage.\u201d <\/p>\n Dean said that it\u2019s important to examine \u201call the data\u201d and the \u201ctrue trends that underlie this,\u201d though he did not elaborate on what those trends were.<\/p>\n One of Google\u2019s earliest employees, Dean joined the company in 1999 and is credited with being one of the key people<\/a> who transformed its early internet search engine into a powerful system capable of indexing the internet and reliably serving billions of users. Dean cofounded the Google Brain project in 2011, spearheading the company\u2019s efforts to become a leader in AI. Last year, Alphabet merged Google Brain with DeepMind, the AI company Google acquired in 2014, and made Dean chief scientist reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai.<\/p>\n By combining the two teams, Dean said that the company has \u201ca better set of ideas to build on,\u201d and can \u201cpool the compute so that we focus on training one large-scale effort like Gemini rather than multiple fragmented efforts.\u201d<\/p>\n Dean also responded to a question about the status of Google\u2019s Project Astra<\/a>\u2014a research project which DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis unveiled in May at Google I\/O, the company\u2019s annual developer conference. Described by Hassabis as a \u201cuniversal AI agent\u201d that can understand the context of a user\u2019s environment, a video demonstration of Astra showed how users could point their phone camera to nearby objects and ask the AI agent relevant questions such as \u201cWhat neighborhood am I in?\u201d or \u201cDid you see where I left my glasses?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n At the time, the company said the Astra technology will come to the Gemini app later this year. But Dean put it more conservatively:\u00a0 \u201cWe\u2019re hoping to have something out into the hands of test users by the end of the year,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n \u201cThe ability to combine Gemini models with models that actually have agency and can perceive the world around you in a multimodal way is going to be quite powerful,\u201d Dean said. \u201cWe\u2019re obviously approaching this responsibly, so we want to make sure that the technology is ready and that it doesn\u2019t have unforeseen consequences, which is why we\u2019ll roll it out first to a smaller set of initial test users.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n As for the continued evolution of AI models, Dean noted that additional data and computing power alone will not suffice. A couple more generations of scaling will get us considerably farther, Dean said, but eventually there will be a need for \u201csome additional algorithmic breakthroughs.\u201d <\/p>\n Dean said his team has long focused on ways to combine scaling with algorithmic approaches in order to improve factuality and reasoning capabilities, so that \u201cthe model can imagine plausible outputs and reason it\u2019s way through which one makes the most sense.\u201d <\/p>\n Those kind of advances Dean said, will be important \u201cto really make these models robust and more reliable than they already are.\u201d<\/p>\n Read more coverage from Brainstorm Tech 2024:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Wiz CEO says \u2018consolidation in the security market is truly a necessity\u2019 as reports swirl of $23 billion Google acquisition<\/a><\/p>\n Why Grindr\u2019s CEO believes \u2018synthetic employees\u2019 are about to unleash a brutal talent war for tech startups<\/a><\/p>\n Experts worry that a U.S.-China cold war could turn hot: \u2018Everyone\u2019s waiting for the shoe to drop in Asia\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n CEO Daily provides key context for the news leaders need to know from across the world of business. Every weekday morning, more than 125,000 readers trust CEO Daily for insights about\u2013and from inside\u2013the C-suite. Subscribe Now<\/a>.<\/div>\n\nAlgorithmic breakthroughs needed<\/h2>\n
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