Building AI to accelerate science and improve lives

Google says it is asking what is possible for health, natural disaster and weather resilience, learning, and economic opportunity. It announced a milestone: Google technologies now support more than 300 languages, spoken by 7 billion people, representing 86% of the global population, and it released new interactive insights with its AI & Economy ATLAS, described as the most comprehensive look at how real people use AI globally.

In recent weeks, Google mapped all 9 billion possible single-letter genetic changes across the human genome with AlphaGenome Atlas and made it openly available to researchers. It also introduced WeatherNext 3, its most advanced and accurate global weather model, which delivers 50% more accurate precipitation forecasts a day or more ahead and is already in use in Google products.

Google brought together data on global health, food security, and socioeconomics into a single Planetary Prediction Engine to forecast planetary crises. That system has already been used in the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in the U.S. to identify vulnerable communities across 21 CDC health indicators.

It also scaled AI research to help cut the climate impact of aviation, with applications already in the U.K. in collaboration with the government and in Asia. Google says the throughline is a belief that AI advances can accelerate scientific progress and directly improve people's lives today and in the future.

Google is focusing on making disease detectable, treatable, and preventable, predicting natural disasters, expanding learning, and unlocking economic opportunities for more people. It cautions that AI's benefits are not guaranteed: making them real and mitigating challenges and risks demands that society works together, though progress already makes bold ambitions and once-impossible questions seem addressable.

On health, Google says it is improving disease detection and diagnosis and better understanding health conditions. Its Nobel-Prize winning AlphaFold has predicted all 200 million protein structures known to science, providing a new basis for disease research, and is now used by 4 million researchers in 190 countries in areas from drug discovery to neglected diseases like Chagas disease and leishmaniasis.

AlphaMissense is helping researchers predict disease-causing genetic mutations. The excerpt then cuts off as Google begins to describe further work building on AlphaFold.