Andrew Ng, the founder and former leader of Google Brain, supports Google’s recent decision to remove its pledge not to build an AI system for weapons.
“We are extremely pleased that Google has changed its stance,” NG said in an on-stage interview with TechCrunch at the Military Veteran Startup Conference in San Francisco.
Earlier this week, Google removed its seven-year-old pledge from its AI Principles webpage. In addition to deleting, Google has published a blog post written by Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis. DemisHassabis said businesses and governments should work together to build AIs that “support national security.”
Google made the AI weapons pledge in 2018 after the Project Maven protest. The protest saw thousands of employees protest against the company’s contract with the US military. Protesters were particularly problematic with Google providing AI on military programs that could be used to help interpret video images and improve the accuracy of drone strikes.
However, Ng was confused by the Project Maven protesters, but he told an audience consisting primarily of veterans.
“Frankly, when the monitoring of the project drops, […] Many of you are willing to go out and shed blood for our nation to protect our nation,” Ng said. “So how can American companies refuse to help our own services people who are fighting for us?”
NG didn’t work with Google when the Project Maven protest occurred, but it played a key role in shaping Google’s efforts on AI and neural networks. Today, NG leads AI-focused venture studio AI funds and frequently speaks about AI policy.
Ng later said he appreciated two AI regulatory efforts – the rejected California bill, SB 1047, and the overturned Biden AI executive order, no longer functioning. He repeatedly argued that both measures would slow America’s open source AI development.
According to Ng, the real key to American AI security is to allow the US to technically compete with China. He said that AI drones “will revolutionize the battlefield completely.”
It’s not just the former Google executive who spread the message. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is currently lobbying in Washington, DC and competing with China by purchasing AI drones. His company, White Stork, may eventually supply those drones.
Although Ng and Schmidt seem to support military AI use, this topic has split ranks within Google for years.
Meredith Whitaker, now president of Signal, led the Maven protest in 2018 while working as an AI researcher at Google. When Google pledged not to renew its Project Maven contract, Whittaker said she was happy with the decision, saying the company “should not be involved in the business of war.”
She is not the only Googler to object. Former Google AI researcher and Nobel loser Jeffrey Hinton previously asked the World Government to ban and regulate the use of AI with weapons. Another long-established, long-established Google executive, Jeff Dean (now the lead scientist at Deepmind), has signed a letter opposed to the use of machine learning in autonomous weapons.
In recent years, Google and Amazon have fallen into new scrutiny of military activities, including a project Nimbus contract with the Israeli government. Employees from both cloud providers staged Sit-ins last year to protest Project Nimbus.
The Pentagon and military around the world have new appetites to use AI, the Pentagon chief executive told TechCrunch earlier. As Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other tech giants invest hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure, many are trying to bounce back their investments through military partnerships.
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