You may laugh Pichai’s comparison off as the usual Silicon Valley hype, but the company’s dealmakers aren’t laughing. Since 2007, Google has bought at least 30 AI companies working on everything from image recognition to more human-sounding computer voices—more than any of its Big Tech peers. One of these acquisitions, DeepMind, which Google bought in 2014, just announced that it can predict the structure of every protein in the human body from the DNA of cells—an achievement that could fire up numerous breakthroughs in biological and medical research. These breakthroughs will of course only happen if Google allows broad access to DeepMind’s knowledge, but the good news is that Google has decided it will. However, there is a “but.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has suggested—more than once—that artificial intelligence (AI) will affect humanity’s development more profoundly than humanity’s harnessing of fire . He was speaking, of course, of AI as a technology that gives machines or software the ability to mimic human intelligence to complete ever more complex tasks with little or no human input at all.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has suggested—more than once—that artificial intelligence (AI) will affect humanity’s development more profoundly than humanity’s harnessing of fire. He was speaking, of course, of AI as a technology that gives machines or software the ability to mimic human intelligence to complete ever more complex tasks with little or no human input at all.

You may laugh Pichai’s comparison off as the usual Silicon Valley hype, but the company’s dealmakers aren’t laughing. Since 2007, Google has bought at least 30 AI companies working on everything from image recognition to more human-sounding computer voices—more than any of its Big Tech peers.