In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I discuss how Google Cloud’s $3 million in computing credits could help European researchers tackle some of science’s most persistent challenges.
Highlights
00:03 — Google Cloud, alongside Google DeepMind, are planning to give up to 200 leading European scientific researchers direct access to Google’s frontier models, as well as $3 million in Google Cloud computing credits. The credits are essentially there to ensure researchers have the computing capacity that they need for their research.
00:27 — So, beyond the models, researchers will also have access to some incredibly powerful tools like AlphaFold 3, a well-known tool that helps predict molecular structures, WeatherNext, a weather forecasting tool, and AlphaGenome, which helps researchers study DNA. This is part of a European initiative supporting the EU’s AI for Science initiative called RAISE, the Resource for AI Science in Europe.
01:08 — So, there are the obvious geopolitical impacts here. This is certainly going to give the EU’s science and technology sector a boost. But for me, this is actually a lot more significant than those potential economic gains. I see this as a really outstanding demonstration of how we can pivot AI towards solving some of the problems that we’ve been unable to solve without this model infrastructure.
01:34 — Now, I think we’ve all been promised a great deal in terms of the potential social impact of AI, targeting those really difficult problems, but I think the onus has been on the developers of this technology, the companies, to make those discoveries. For me, this is a much more targeted and scalable approach.
01:54 — Google’s committing resources to the RAISE initiative, but the EU is putting the wider framework in place. This, I think, is how we get to the root of some of our most persistent challenges using AI: by not only developing the technology, but also building the structures that enable it to be put to work where it’s needed most, and not making it the sole responsibility of the model developers.
