AI will cure cancer in our lifetime, claims boss of UK chip giant – BBC News
By Faisal Islam, Economics editor
Published 7 hours ago
The boss of the biggest UK-headquartered tech firm has said that artificial intelligence (AI) will find a cure for cancer that humans cannot in our lifetimes.
Rene Haas, chief executive of Cambridge-based chip designer Arm Holdings, said while modelling how a DNA marker is impacted by cancer was currently "too complex" a problem, computers are "going to solve it" in the future.
Haas also told the BBC that AI would lead to widespread humanoid robots in the next five years, but that its current rapid growth was being held up by a shortage of chips needed to build data centres. He expressed scepticism about the idea chips could be manufactured in the UK in the future.
Arm designs the brains or CPUs of microchips already used in hundreds of billions of phones, cars, smartwatches and gadgets across the globe. Earlier this summer, the company’s peak share price amid the AI boom made it, in cash terms, the most valuable UK-based company in history.
Haas, who stepped down from the board of British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca in April, said:
"AI is going to… find a cure for cancer that today you and I, other humans [could] not in our lifetimes. I believe in our lifetime, AI will help cure cancer."
He went on to explain:
"Modelling a cell, modelling a human, modelling how a DNA marker is impacted by cancer – it’s too complex a problem, not only for humans today, but the computers that run AI. However, 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."
Prof Chris Bakal, from the Institute of Cancer Research, London, and CEO of Sentinal4D, agreed that the real question was no longer whether we use AI, but what we feed it. He noted that labs like his are training AI on data generated themselves from patient samples, rather than relying on scraped internet data:
"It is not scraped from the internet. It does not need a giant data centre to run. 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 this kind of prediction could "cut years from the time it takes to develop new treatments".
In a wide-ranging interview, Haas also addressed concerns about job losses due to AI:
"The estimates of jobs going away and being completely replaced by machines is a bit overstated… [AI] will create more opportunities than it destroys."
He concluded that while there would be some change for workers, the long-term demand for AI technology outweighs these concerns.
