Editor’s note: Today, Google CEO Sundar Pichai spoke in Paris, France at the AI Action Summit. What follows is a transcript of the remarks, as prepared for delivery.
Distinguished leaders, everyone: I’m excited to be here with you all today.
President Macron, thank you for the invitation and for gathering such an esteemed group here.
AI is a once in a lifetime technology. And conversations like these, ones focused on collaboration and concrete action, will move this work forward.
As today’s sessions come to a close, I want to share some examples of why I’m so optimistic about AI and its applications — and the opportunity we have to benefit everyone, everywhere.
Improving lives through technology is personal for me.
I grew up in Chennai, India. Each new technology took a while to arrive at our doorstep. That included the rotary phone. We were on a five-year wait list. And when it finally came, the phone changed our lives.
Before I would need to take a four hour round trip to get blood test results for my mother. And sometimes I would go all the way to the hospital and they would say, “No, it’s not ready. Come back tomorrow.” Now, we only had to pick up the phone.
I saw the positive impact technology could have to make things better. It set me on a course that would bring me to the U.S., and eventually to a growing start-up called Google.
I couldn’t have imagined then that one day I would toast three Google colleagues their Nobel Prizes, or take my parents for a ride in a driverless car, all within a couple of weeks. And all because of another technology: AI.
We’re still in the early days, yet I already believe AI will be the most profound shift of our lifetimes.
Bigger than the shift to personal computing, or to mobile. And it will do more to democratize access to information than the internet.
In 18 months, the cost to process one token — or the building blocks used for processing information — has come down 97% for developers. So what used to cost four dollars per million tokens now costs just 13 cents, and I expect this trend to continue.
The result: intelligence is more available and accessible than ever before.
So, this moment has the characteristics of a platform shift. But what makes it so profound? A couple of things:
As AI interactions come to feel more intuitive and human — they put us at the center of the experience. Technology begins to feel like a natural extension, augmenting human capability, bridging gaps in expertise and experience, and breaking down barriers like language and accessibility.
As a truly general purpose technology, AI is applicable across many different human endeavors and all parts of the economy — every company, every sector will use this technology in their own ways, including the public sector.
As it continues to improve, it will spur innovation, opportunity and growth in economies around the world, and drive an explosion in knowledge, learning, creativity, and productivity that will shape the future in exciting ways.
The opportunity with AI is as big as it gets. And it will be up to the people in this room to make sure that as many people as possible benefit.
