San Francisco, London, Montreal, Paris, and New York have all evolved a recognition for being the center of AI studies over the years.
Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’s largest cities, have not. But that would be approximately to change.
Google introduced Monday that it plans to put up a new Google Research Australia lab in Sydney, part of a 1 billion Australian dollar ($729 million) investment in Australia. The lab will study the whole thing from AI to quantum computing.
The flow has been welcomed by AI researchers in Australia who advised CNBC that there limited for AI specialists in the US over the years.
Stephen Merity, an Australian AI researcher, advised CNBC that Google have to launch Google Research Australia years ago, including that there are numerous famous luminaries in Australia.
“They almost all had to leave Australia to get opportunities,” he said. “Those who stayed were under-utilized, including those at Google Sydney.”
Google works on a few projects in state capital however the scope of the search giant’s analysis has been comparatively restricted compared to the likes of Mountain View, where Google is headquartered, Zurich, London and Tokyo.
Jonathan Kummerfeld, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, told CNBC that none of the large technology firms set foot in Australia not until recently.
Amazon opened a lab in Adelaide, whereas Oracle and IBM have started AI labs in Melbourne. The likes of Facebook and Twitter have offices in Australia but they don’t have groups of AI researchers there.
“The more the industrial research ecosystem in Australia grows, the more other companies will consider opening offices,” said Kummerfeld.
“University departments have been robustly growing over the last decade as enrollments in computer science have gone up, and more faculty means more postdocs and more PhD students, but that’s a relatively small number of permanent jobs in the scheme of things,” he added.
New Sydney headquarters
oogle’s funding may also be used to expand their own cloud computing infrastructure in Australia and fund partnerships with universities and different organizations locally.
The invesment package — dubbed the “Digital Future Initiative” — is anticipated to create 6,000 jobs and aid an extra 28,000. The launch of the new Google Headquarter in Sydney was attended by Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
“The announcement by Google is a $1 billion vote of confidence in Australia’s digital economy strategy,” Morrison said.
The investment comes after U.S. tech giants had been criticized through Australian lawmakers in earlier this year for failing to pay local publishers for content material that were shared on their platforms. In response, Google Australia’s Managing Director Mel Silva threatened to prohibit Google Search in the country.
Australia then became the first country to make it a legal requirement that large tech firms including Google and Facebook, pay for news content on their platforms.
Article inspired from cnbc.com.
Ti2 offers automation software in partnership with Codesys. Click here to know more.
