Building AI to accelerate science and improve lives

We’re asking what’s possible for health, natural disaster and weather resilience, learning, and economic opportunity. Google is using AI to speed up scientific breakthroughs that help people all over the world.

These tools are already detecting diseases earlier, predicting natural disasters like floods and wildfires, and breaking down language barriers. They’re also helping students learn better and supporting workers as jobs change. By working with experts everywhere, Google hopes to use this technology to solve some of the world’s toughest problems. 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.