Artificial intelligence pioneer and Google Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis has said that he would pay “thousands of dollars” to get rid of his daily emails as he gets too overwhelmed by them.
Speaking at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival on Monday, June 2, the Nobel laureate said his team at Google Deepmind is working on an AI-powered mechanism that will address this exact issue and take over the tedious task of managing email inboxes.
“I would love to get rid of my email. I would pay thousands of dollars per month to get rid of that,” Hassabis said.
The new system will be aimed at helping users managing their email inboxes, sorting through mails automatically and replying to regular messages. The tool will also ensure that the important messages do not go unnoticed.
“The thing I really want – and we’re working on – is can we have a next-generation email?,” Hassabis said.
He revealed that the new AI tool by Google will not only manage and filter emails but also send replies that match the user’s writing style. The tool is currently under development.
AI regulation needed, but difficult: Demis Hassabis
Demis Hassabis also said on Monday that greater international cooperation around AI regulation was needed but “difficult” to achieve “in today’s geopolitical context”.
At a time when AI is being integrated across all industries, its uses have raised major ethical questions, from the spread of misinformation to its impact on employment, or the loss of technological control.
Speaking at the SXSW festival on Monday, Hassabis, who has won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research on AI, also addressed the challenges that artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a technology that could match and even surpass human capability — would bring.
“The most important thing is it’s got to be some form of international cooperation because the technology is across all borders. It’s going to get applied to all countries,” Hassabis said.
“Many, many countries are involved in researching or building data centres or hosting these technologies. So I think for anything to be meaningful, there has to be some sort of international cooperation or collaboration and unfortunately that’s looking quite difficult in today’s geopolitical context,” he said.
