Google CEO Thinks Devices Are The Past While AI Is The Future

Every year, Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin release a letter to investors where they share where the company is and their thought for the future. Most of these letters were released when Google was still just “Google” but when Alphabet (Google’s parent company) was formed last August, they handed the reins of Google to Sundar Pichai whom they allowed to send this year’s Founders’ letter.

In a post yesterday, the Google CEO outlined some ideas for the future. As expected Artificial Intelligence (AI) was a key part of that vision. Pichai thinks devices will be a thing of the past while AI will be the future.

“A key driver behind all of this work has been our long-term investment in machine learning and AI. It’s what allows you to use your voice to search for information, to translate the web from one language to another, to filter the spam from your inbox, to search for “hugs” in your photos and actually pull up pictures of people hugging … to solve many of the problems we encounter in daily life. It’s what has allowed us to build products that get better over time, making them increasingly useful and helpful.”

The report noted that there were 300 million people online in the world at the time when Google was founded in 1998 but today that figure is now 3 billion.

Artificial Intelligence is now being championed by Facebook which is building an assistant called M while Microsoft is looking to improve and restrict its Cortana services to make it more intelligent for users.

The CEO’s vision for Goolge includes improved search engine with emphasis on mobile and cloud computing. This comes as Amazon continues to dominate the public cloud space which has boosted its revenue and ultimately stock price since results were released yesterday.