Scientific advances, real-world benefits
We’ve applied our AI models across the entire computing ecosystem, from making data centres and video compression more efficient to transforming algorithms that power our digital lives. These AI tools are shaping the future of computing and already helping billions of people and the planet.
Through our collaborations, we’ve helped develop innovative machine learning models to reduce training data and optimise document understanding in Document AI. We’re also positively impacted the wind energy sector to help build a carbon-free future, and made AlphaFold available on Vertex AI, so it’s easier for researchers around the world to run, which is catalysing a new wave of progress in biology.
Working together with YouTube’s product and engineering teams, we’ve helped optimise video compression, protect brand safety, and improve auto-generated chapters and chapter titles. These ongoing collaborations are having a significant impact from saving bandwidth and time to increasing trust in the video platform, enhancing the YouTube experience for people around the world every day.
Proteins are complex molecules that are essential to life. Each has its own unique 3D shape that determines how it works and what it does. Knowing how proteins fold has the potential to help scientists make enormous progress in every field of biology, from quickly finding new medicines to unlocking the mysteries of life itself. To accelerate their work, we created AlphaFold, a system which accurately predicts the shape of proteins, and released the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database containing more than 200m+ protein structures, covering nearly all catalogued proteins known to science.
Over 100 million people are affected by diabetic retinopathy or age-related macular degeneration. These conditions can cause permanent sight loss unless they’re treated quickly. The results, which were published in Nature Medicine, showed that our AI system could recommend patient referrals as accurately as world-leading expert doctors for over 50 sight-threatening eye diseases. More recently, we showed that our system can predict whether a patient will develop a more severe form of age-related macular degeneration months before it happens–paving the way for future research in sight-loss prevention.
It’s essential to keep these servers cool, but this takes a lot of electricity. Even minor improvements would significantly reduce energy usage and CO2 emissions. By building an AI system that manages data centre cooling more efficiently, we helped save around 30% of the energy needed. We also designed it with safety and reliability in mind, so the AI system works within strict constraints.
Our voice synthesis technology WaveNet is in the hands of people who use Google Assistant and Google Cloud Platform around the world. And our systems have helped improve mobile phone battery use and screen brightness for millions of people using the Android Pie operating system.
