UK tech boss says AI will cure cancer during our lifetime
Arm chief executive Rene Haas believes increasingly powerful AI could solve complex biological problems and help find cancer cures within our lifetimes.
The boss of the UK's biggest technology company has predicted that artificial intelligence will help find a cure for cancer within our lifetimes.
Rene Haas, chief executive of Cambridge-based chip designer Arm Holdings, said AI could eventually solve biological problems that are currently too complex for humans and computers to model.
Haas told the BBC's Big Boss Interview podcast: "AI is going to... find a cure for cancer that today you and I, other humans [could] not in our lifetimes."
He said modelling how a DNA marker is affected by cancer remains an extremely difficult problem, but increasingly powerful computers and larger datasets could eventually make it possible.
Haas said: "Going forward, as we feed more and more of the models into these computers, and the computers get more sophisticated to run the models, they're going to solve it."
The prediction comes as researchers increasingly explore how AI can be used to understand disease and develop new treatments.
Professor Chris Bakal, from the Institute of Cancer Research in London, said the important question was becoming what data AI systems were trained on.
He said: "The future of medical AI will not belong to whoever builds the biggest computer. It will belong to whoever has the right measurements."
Bakal added that training AI on data gathered from patient samples could potentially cut years from the development of new treatments.
Haas also predicted that AI-powered humanoid robots would become widespread within the next five years, with applications ranging from manufacturing and cleaning to security and construction.
He said robots would increasingly be able to see, learn and adapt to new tasks rather than being programmed for one specific job.
However, Haas said the expansion of AI is currently being constrained by a shortage of chips needed to build data centres.
He said: "We are absolutely in a supply-constrained environment."
Arm's energy-efficient chip designs are now used in about half of AI data centres worldwide, according to Haas.
The company has also begun selling its own processors, with more than $2 billion of demand for its new Arm AGI chip since its launch in March.
Despite government interest in strengthening the UK's semiconductor industry, Haas was sceptical about the country building its own advanced chip factories.
Pointing to their huge cost and the specialist workforce and resources required, he said: "I don't think it's necessary for the UK to [build] fabs."
Arm remains a major UK technology employer, with around half of its workforce still based in Britain.
