00:00 Introduction

Welcome to another episode of Give It A Nudge. Today is super special because there’s often guests that take a while to get on, and this Mike from Google finally got him on. He is coming on to talk about what he’s doing at Google but also talking about what Google’s doing for all of us on the planet. Welcome to the show Mike.

It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. It has taken, I actually don’t know, I think we might have wanted to be our first guest like three and a half years ago. No. But it has taken a while. Thank you so much for coming on.

01:20 Role at Google Cloud

My current role: I work at Google in Google Cloud, head up the VC and startup ecosystem across Asia Pacific, based here in Sydney. A role that has a lot of focus areas. India, Singapore are kind of key markets for us. And we’ll be venturing into China very soon.

02:35 Tech background and early career

I’m a technologist at heart. I studied software engineering at university. I told the story of how I first started playing with computers when I was five when Dad brought a BBC Acorn back home. To run a game through a tape player you have to type prompts, so you’re immediately starting to learn prompts. Then from there I realised that you could code games fairly easily. I got a book of code of games and I would spend hours writing all of these lines of code in order to create a game with graphics. The graphics were terrible but at the time, mind-blowing.

06:11 Digital Futures and key projects

This all fits under our Digital Futures initiative, which is a $1 billion commitment to invest in Australia’s digital future. That’s the one billion just for Australia. A combination of three areas: technology, which includes the investment in the cloud data centres we’ve got locally, which we only used to have overseas. Melbourne. Big data centre. We have partnerships, so partnering closely with CSIRO. And we have research, so we’ve actually built an AI Research Centre headed up by Grace Trun. This is bringing AI experts from both leading Australian researchers and actually tapping into some of the global talent.

09:50 Environmental and medical partnerships

Up in the Great Barrier Reef, looking at the Crown of Thorns starfish. It’s doing the opposite of getting extinct. It’s actually killing the coral. They were using very ineffective, very labour-intensive methods of detection. So starting to use satellite imagery or planes flying over, using AI and machine learning to identify clusters of these, then sending boats out. They’re building robot boats to drive out to extract the starfish.

The more recent one we announced is down in Tasmania. 95 percent of the kelp forest has gone away due to global warming. They’re using machine learning and AI to identify what is it about the DNA of surviving specimens, and can we replicate it to bring back the species.

16:18 AI and generative AI explained

AI is the over-banner for machine learning, essentially the broad term for how you can bring artificial intelligence, which is generally going to be looking at the data and understanding how you can make extrapolations from that data. Generative AI is a subset of AI. Just think of it as: AI is the broad term, gen AI is very much about generating content. That content may be text, image, audio. They call it multimodal. We’re seeing very much the text and image, starting to see some video come through, audio as well, and code, which is a huge one. The cool thing is that it’s not just the outputs that could be multimodal, it’s the inputs as well.