Remember all those articles trying to teach you how to use less electricity and save money? Well, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has found a more efficient way to do just that, and without even clicking the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button. However, you’ll need an Artificial Intelligence for that.
Google reduced energy used for cooling by 40% and overall power usage by 15% via its DeepMind artificial intelligence technology.
The Internet giant became the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy last year, and projects like DeepMind tasked with making the company’s operations more efficient and green, are part of Google’s “Environmentally Conscious Technology” initiative.
Facebook’s loss is Google’s gain
Google DeepMind was born in September 2010 as DeepMind Technologies. The British artificial intelligence company was founded by A.I. researchers Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman.
Subsequently, major venture capital firms Horizons Ventures and Founders Fund invested in the enterprise, as well as entrepreneur Scott Banister and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk.
In 2014, Google acquired DeepMind Technologies for $500 million, and the company was renamed Google DeepMind. That same year, in October, DeepMind received the “Company of the Year” award by Cambridge Computer Laboratory.
Shortly after the sale, it was revealed that one of DeepMind’s conditions for allowing Google to takeover was that they establish an A.I. Ethics board. To date, nobody knows the identity of the person at the board’s helm, in what it is one of biggest mysteries in the tech world.
Google goes green
Since 2007, Google has endorsed a green initiative known as “Environmentally Conscious Technology,” making its objective to power all its operations with renewable energy by 2025.
In 2009, the company created a subsidiary named Google Energy with the goal of reducing Google’s energy consumption costs, and subsequently to produce and sell clean energy.
The following year, in 2010, Google made its first investment in a renewable energy project, putting $38.8 million into two wind farms in North Dakota.
From board games to cut electricity bill
However, Google’s biggest discovery in the green energy area was the A.I. technology of DeepMind, which was more recently used to power a computer Go program called AlphaGo that amazingly defeated top professional players of the notoriously difficult game “Go.”
At first sight, it came from the most unlikely source. But in fact, DeepMind is mainly designed toward perfecting a given task by using “machine learning” to recognize patterns from past data and take a more efficient action in the future.
So, much to the surprise of many, Google wrote in its DeepMind blog that the A.I. had helped the company reduce the cooling bill by a whopping 40%, which at the same time resulted in a 15% overall decrease in power usage.
The electric power industry will not be as thrilled, though, when Google’s electricity payment bills cash in. As Google’s biggest rival, Amazon is another one that should be concerned, as well as the whole industry. While Google is stepping closer to a 100% and 24/7 green powered operations, Amazon only has a bad environmental record.
Source: The Huffington Post