Google’s heavy investment in artificial intelligence has helped the company’s software write music and beat humans at complex board games. What unlikely feats could be next? The company’s new head of AI says he’d like to see Google move deeper into areas such as healthcare. He also warns that the company will face some tricky ethical questions over appropriate uses for AI as it expands its use of the technology.
The new AI boss at Google is Jeff Dean. The lean 50-year-old computer scientist joined the company in 1999, when it was a startup less than one year old. He earned a reputation as one of the industry’s most talented coders by helping Google become a computational powerhouse with new approaches to databases and large-scale data analysis. Google colleagues once created a joke website of “Jeff Dean facts,” including his purported role in accelerating the speed of light. Another had it that Dean doesn’t really exist—he’s an advanced AI created by Jeff Dean.