After a busy Google I/O, the company’s chief executive sits down with the hosts of “Hard Fork” to discuss the future of Google Search, how he’s using A.I. agents and his advice for college graduates.
At this year’s Google I/O developer conference, Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, hosts of the “Hard Fork” podcast, sat down with Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google, and talked about where he feels it is succeeding in the A.I. race, and where he thinks the company can do better.
During Tuesday’s Google I/O keynote, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, proclaimed that we are currently “standing in the foothills of the singularity.” It was a striking statement—the singularity is the theoretical future moment when AI rapidly exceeds human intelligence and dramatically transforms the world. But what struck me as I listened in the…
Google has only one way to measure the phenomenal AI growth it’s seen: in tokens.
The company processes 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during this week’s I/O keynote, adding, “never imagined I’d say quadrillion…, but here we are.”
Basically, tokens are a unit of measure used by large language models (LLMs) to process data.
Tokens, which have been called the “new oil” fueling the AI revolution, are also a way AI vendors can meter usage and price their services. Enterprises are lusting for tokens, and spending billions of them to grab compute time.
As with oil, the demand for tokens is seemingly insatiable — and it is straining an already short GPU supply, which in turn is increasing the cost of running AI tools.
What exactly is a token?
Similar to the way humans think, LLMs grasp the meaning of a sentence by breaking words down into tokens. Pichai described them as “the fundamental units of data our models process, many representing a problem being solve
Let’s unpack what Demis Hassabis said at the end of yesterday’s Google I/O keynote.
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. This week's issue is a special early edition tied to The Verge's Google I/O coverage. You can expect our next issue at its usual time next Friday. Opt in for Optimizer here.
Toward the end of this year's Google I/O keynote, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis declared, with a completely deadpan face, that the company hopes to "reimagine the drug discovery process with the goal of one day solving all disease."
This is the sort of statement that the phras …
Read the full story at The Verge.