Sergey Brin shouts out Ethereum and warns of AI in annual founders' letter

while Sergey Brin talks, humans listen. And right now Brin is speakme approximately AI and cryptocurrency.

as the president of Alphabet, Google's parent business enterprise, Brin is uniquely placed to now not only see what technological developments are coming down the pike however to steer them as well. That makes the agency's annual founders' letter an critical indicator for the tech international. in line with Brin, who wrote this 12 months's, the signs are combined.

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He opens the letter by way of quoting from Charles Dickens's A story of towns, and proceeds from there to dive into the huge growth in computing strength that he is witnessed at some stage in his tenure at Google and Alphabet.

"There are numerous elements at play on this growth of computing," he writes. "First, of path, is the consistent hum of Moore’s law, despite the fact that some of the conventional measures inclusive of transistor counts, density, and clock frequencies have slowed. the second factor is extra demand, stemming from superior images in gaming and, quite, from the GPU-friendly evidence-of-work algorithms found in some of these days’s main cryptocurrencies, along with Ethereum."

that is proper, cryptocurrency, despite the fact that it turns out to now not be precise for something else, has in Brin's thoughts at the least driven computing ahead. So there may be that.

the principle recognition of the letter, however, is synthetic intelligence. Brin highlights the Google services and products that advantage from neural networks, and the list is pretty large.

recognize photos in Google pictures;

allow Waymo cars to recognize and distinguish objects safely;

substantially improve sound and camera first-rate in our hardware;

recognize and produce speech for Google domestic;

translate over one hundred languages in Google Translate;

caption over a thousand million films in 10 languages on YouTube;

improve the performance of our records centers;

advocate brief replies to emails;

help medical doctors diagnose sicknesses, consisting of diabetic retinopathy;

discover new planetary structures;

create better neural networks (AutoML);
... and lots greater.

however it is now not all roses. Brin brings us backtrack to earth by asking "how might [powerful tools] control people" and whether or now not they are secure.

And just like Elon Musk has carried out earlier than him (albeit in a more subdued way), Brin acknowledges that artificial intelligence could pose some no longer-quite-but-understood dangers.

"most drastically, protection spans a wide variety of concerns from the fears of sci-fi fashion sentience to the greater close to-time period questions which include validating the performance of self-driving cars."

So there you have got it. according to one of the most influential humans within the international of tech, the destiny is bright — thanks in small element to cryptocurrency — and it's going to stay bright as long as AI does not spoil it interested by us.