We’re asking what’s possible for health, natural disaster and weather resilience, learning, and economic opportunity.
Today, we reached a significant milestone that stands as a testament to decades of AI research and advancement: Google technologies now support more than 300 languages, spoken by 7 billion people — representing 86% of the global population. To help us understand how these tools are driving real-world opportunity, we also released new interactive insights today with our AI & Economy ATLAS, the most comprehensive look at how real people are using AI globally. This comes on top of a raft of key AI advances in science to benefit people over just the past few weeks:
What ties all of this work together? It is the belief that advances in AI can accelerate scientific progress in ways that will directly improve people’s lives today and in the future. This is a key element of what motivates our work in AI. We’re focusing our work in key areas that matter most: making disease detectable, treatable, and preventable, predicting natural disasters, expanding learning, and unlocking economic opportunities for more people.
While the possibilities are exciting, the benefits of AI are not guaranteed. Making them real — and mitigating their challenges and risks — demands that society works together. Though there is more still to do, AI’s progress is already making it possible for us to aspire to do bold and ambitious things that can benefit people, and to ask and address questions that were once considered impossible to solve.
We’re making progress in using AI to improve disease detection and diagnosis, and to better understand health conditions:
To protect people’s safety and livelihoods, we need accurate predictions of natural disasters and weather. To make accurate predictions, we must understand the physical earth. Here’s how our technical and scientific progress is already making a difference in crisis prediction and detection:
Learning is the bedrock of economic and societal progress. The world has made huge strides in education: 90% of primary school-aged children globally are enrolled in school, and approximately 87% complete their primary education. But 2022 research showed uneven access to education, differences in education quality, and limited content availability across languages, among other issues. Global learning outcomes have declined over the last two decades across 81 countries.
AI offers a profound opportunity to expand access to knowledge and support learners and educators alike:
Tackling challenges and focusing on responsible design: AI presents real challenges for learning, including questions on accuracy, safety, critical thinking, cheating, and learning loss. That’s why we have partnered with ISTE+ASCD to provide AI literacy training to all 6 million educators in the U.S., while conducting ongoing and rigorous research to ensure we design our educational tools with teachers in the lead, and AI as the assistant. We still have much to work through together.
Across the economy, AI can drive innovation and productivity for workers, businesses, and organizations across sectors. Its true value isn’t in what it does on its own, but in how people choose to use it and what they build with it:
Grounded in our company’s founding mission, we are making important strides in breaking down languages and accessibility barriers with products, research, and models that understand the world’s languages exactly as they are expressed:
We believe that such bold ambitions for the societal benefits of AI must always be accompanied by an equal commitment to responsibility. This is the basis of our bold and responsible approach to AI. Beyond our ongoing work to address the immediate and future risks of AI (detailed in our annual updates), the application of AI and science presents distinct challenges: On the one hand, we need the right detection, reporting, and mitigation tools in place to address risks around chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) mis-use. At the same time, it is important to avoid the risk of missed use — that is, not applying AI in places and communities where it would provide benefit and, in some cases, worsening existing societal challenges and gaps.
We believe advancing scientific discovery and bringing those benefits to communities requires that we collaborate deeply with many other researchers and scientists working to tackle similar issues, including academia, national laboratories, philanthropic foundations, non-governmental organizations, governments, other companies, and local partners. The examples of advances cited above have benefited from such research collaborations and our own Google.org grant-making to accelerate scientific discovery and to address society’s greatest challenges. That’s why as part of our longstanding commitment to supporting science and discovery in academia, Google has given more than $1 billion across 1,700+ research institutions worldwide since 2006.
As Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr noted, new technology drives scientific advances, which in turn drive new technologies, creating "a positive feedback loop that can keep growing with no end in sight.” And it does so in ways that have improved people’s wellbeing and propelled societal progress. AI is the most powerful engine for that loop we have ever built — and we’re just getting started.
Read more about how we’re using AI to help people, improve lives, and benefit society at our website.
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