Pichai flags Google's AI push in health, weather and learning
Sundar Pichai has outlined Google's AI work across health, weather resilience, learning and economic opportunity, citing tools for genomics, forecasting and disease response.
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai has set out the company's artificial intelligence priorities across health, weather resilience, learning and economic opportunity, positioning the technology as a means to accelerate scientific research and produce measurable public gains.
In a blog post shared on his X account, Pichai said the company was concentrating its efforts in four areas: health, natural disaster and weather resilience, learning, and economic opportunity. The intervention comes amid a wider debate over whether the pace of AI development should be slowed.
According to the post, Google's AI technologies now support more than 300 languages used by roughly seven billion people, or about 86 per cent of the global population.
On the health and research front, Pichai said the company had used AlphaGenome Atlas to map all nine billion possible single-letter genetic changes across the human genome and made the resource openly available to researchers. Google also published an AI and Economy Atlas, described as a comprehensive open-access look at how people are using AI worldwide.
In weather and disaster response, the company introduced WeatherNext 3, which it describes as its most advanced and accurate global weather model, delivering precipitation forecasts that are 50 per cent more accurate a day or more ahead. The model is already being used in Google's products.
Google said it had combined data on global health, food security and socioeconomics into a single Planetary Prediction Engine to forecast planetary crises. The tool has already been used in the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and, in the United States, to identify vulnerable communities across 21 CDC health indicators.
Even as it pointed to these applications, the company cautioned that AI's benefits are not assured. It said realising them while managing associated challenges and risks would require collective effort across society, and warned against the risk of "missed use" — failing to apply AI in places and communities where it could help, which in some cases could deepen existing societal gaps.