I would have to assume she sees some interesting deals.
From Puck, June 21:
Ruth or Dare
Alphabet president and chief investment officer Ruth Porat has a cogent and forceful argument for all those A.I. doomers out there—starting with a productivity revolution that she believes will add trillions to the U.S. economy.
Last week at the Economic Club of New York, Ruth Porat, the president of Alphabet/Google, joined IBM C.E.O. Arvind Krishna to make the bull case for A.I.—and to swat away the concerns voiced by the technology’s growing ranks of critics. As you may have noticed recently, esteemed techworld commencement speakers—Eric Schmidt, Gloria Caulfield, and Scott Borchetta—have been practically booed off the stage when they bring up A.I. (Porat’s boss at Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, artfully minimized the topic during his address at Stanford, though some students walked out anyway.) And no wonder: As Gene Sperling, the former director of the National Economic Council, argued this week in the Financial Times, “A.I. enthusiasts need to lose the delusion that if working families could only comprehend the productivity gains, consumer conveniences, and potential medical breakthroughs that the technology may bring, they would get over their fear of losing their standard of living, meaningful work, and hopes for their children’s economic future. They won’t.”Of course, no one booed Porat at the Economic Club. While A.I. might pulverize Gen Z job prospects, this crowd had already made its money and Wall Street’s frenzy over A.I. hasn’t exactly done their portfolios any harm—at least not yet. Yes, those data centers hoovering up enormous amounts of power might be an environmental problem, but Porat addressed those worries head on. As a former Morgan Stanley banker, and once the firm’s C.F.O., Porat has become one of the most revered business executives during her 11 years at Google/Alphabet. At the Economic Club, she began by ticking off ways that A.I. would lead to “profound” benefits for society. She argued that the technology could add roughly $4 trillion to the U.S. GDP—about a 10 percent increase—over the next several years. Krishna noted that growth on that scale could mark the difference between a sluggish economy and what he called “a breakaway” economy. (Notably, Alphabet just raised a fresh $85 billion in equity capital to continue its own massive A.I. buildout.)Porat then turned to A.I.’s implications for science, citing the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry shared by her Google DeepMind colleagues Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for using A.I. to predict the 3D structure of proteins based on their genetic sequences. “It has been described as one of the greatest contributions to drug discovery in our lifetime,” Porat said. Previously, she noted, a Ph.D. student might spend four years diagramming a single protein—and there are roughly 200 million proteins. Hassabis’s response to that challenge was simple. “‘Why not?’” she recalled him saying. “If there’s one thing I would want to leave anybody with—that I quote a lot at Google—it’s that with A.I., the question ‘Why not?’ is something we should each be asking ourselves about anything that to date has been intractable. Because it lets you break through it.”Porat went on to cite A.I.’s potential benefits for cybersecurity, healthcare, education, and food security. “We were talking about a whole host of really important social issues that we can now address as a result of A.I.,” she said. Krishna then brought up what many in the room were likely thinking about—“some of the downsides of A.I.,” he said, particularly the spiraling cost of energy from new data centers. That turned out to be a softball for Porat. “We can’t have the upside of A.I. without the energy to power it,” she said, arguing that with so much upside, “we can responsibly protect” the downside. “When I was in New York as a banker, one of the core things we all learned is if you really want to address a risk issue, you have to go at the root cause of the risk issue.”The real root cause, she said, was decades of underinvestment in energy infrastructure. “It’s caught up with us,” she said, adding that data centers currently use about 4 percent of the energy grid and are on their way to using around 12 percent. Yet she cited a study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that suggested, counterintuitively, that electricity prices have actually risen more slowly in states with data centers than states without them. “Data centers through 2024 have actually helped keep electricity prices growing at a slower rate,” she said....
....MUCH MORE