JH Explorer in Singapore: AI-focused client event at Google tester

I’m very excited to be here at Google Singapore today and we’re going to be talking with some of the senior execs at Google Asia to talk about generative AI* and how important that technology is as the next major compute wave that is going to define the next decade and disrupt many industries.

And I think being here at Google is the perfect place to be doing that because they obviously invented the transformer model, which is the tech that underpinned ChatGPT and is going to lead to some tremendous innovation we feel over the next few years. Also, this sign behind me was saying 25 years just a few days, the 25th anniversary and the birthday of Google, they’ve actually been listed almost 20 years, which very much coincide with the 20 years that I’ve been a technology investor.

And I’ve learnt may new things from Google over the years. The fact that you have to continue to innovate, the fact that you dominate the PC, internet is not enough, you’ve got to invent Android to dominate the mobile internet. And again, that’s not enough you’ve got to then innovate and launch generative AI and be a leader in the cloud in an AI world too. That’s going to give you success over the long term in such a dynamic industry as tech. And also the fact that to do that and have the confidence to do that, the ability to do that, requires profits. So Google [parent company Alphabet] is one of the most profitable companies in the world, has one of the strongest balance sheets in the world, and again that’s been able to give it the strength to be able to innovate and invest in that R&D that will [likely] drive future growth and future profits for the company.

*Generative AI: refers to deep-learning models that train on large volumes of raw data to generate ‘new content’ including text, images, audio and video.